Dear Concerned,

Under HIPAA, you can contain both the spread of contagious diseases as well as the spread of your anxiety! If a patient in your outpatient clinic has a contagious disease to which other patients of yours may have been exposed, HIPAA encourages a common sense approach to alerting those other patients to the contagious disease as long as protected health information is not disclosed. For example, you can call other patients who were in the waiting room with the patient who had a contagious disease and say: "Please come in and get tested this week. Someone in our outpatient clinic has tested positive for smallpox." HIPAA would prevent you from saying: "Mr. Smart who lives at 503 West Court Street has tested positive for smallpox, and he was in the waiting room with you last Tuesday. Please come in ASAP to get tested." In other words, you must deidentify information in a way that permits you to run your outpatient clinic in an effective and commonsense manner without violating the privacy that HIPAA affords to patients.