HIPAA jams V. Tech panel

The panel formed to grapple with the fallout from Seung-Hui Cho’s murderous rampage on the Virginia Tech campus April 16 faced a serious stumbling block: access to Cho’s mental-health records.

Retired Col. Gerald Massengill, who pulled an embattled Department of Game and Inland Fisheries out of the muck of a public-accountability scandal, headed the panel and committed to keeping as much of the process open to the public as possible. Save for the panel’s final 9-hour closed-door marathon, a continuation of a 4-hour closed meeting five days earlier, the meetings at least started out open.

Portions of other meetings were closed for reasons like consultation with legal counsel. But it was the Health Information Portability and Accountability that proved to be the panel’s biggest obstacle. HIPAA and state laws kept Cho’s mental-health records closed to both the panel and the public.

“We are really operating with our hands tied, blindfolded and maybe even gagged, and it is becoming increasingly frustrating,” said panel member Diane Strickland.

Andrew Goddard, father of an injured student told the panel that it was “incredibly disturbing and distasteful that an individual who brutalized the privacy of so many should have his privacy so doggedly preserved.”
After days of negotiating, Cho’s parents agreed to let Virginia Tech release their son’s medical records, but not his academic records, to the panel, and not to the public.

Virginian-Pilot columnist Margaret Edds observed, “Over recent decades, a body of law has grown up, protecting the academic, disciplinary, medical and mental health records of those 18 and older. Many are well intended. By one view, students are far more likely to seek help when they know parents won’t be informed; by another, silence allowed addictions to grow. But in the wake of Virginia Tech, it’s clear to me we’ve tilted too far.”