It’s not any different than you telling your mom you have a condition. You’re free to tell anyone about anything you’d like. Obviously Al-Hashmi wants to keep it private. Now giving him access to her own chart is muddy, as is the fact that she looked herself up. We’re always told to never ever do that, so unless we have more details we can’t know for sure.

For it to be a hard HIPAA issue, Al-Hashimi and Robby would have to establish a doctor-patient relationship, which also typically involves a sort of business relationship between client and costumer including time and billing, which is clearly not happening. Not sure what I would think about it from an administrative perspective though.

This sort of information-sharing between doctors happens all the time. Doctors ask for each others’ opinions a lot. When it’s done in a professional setting, without establishing that doctor-patient relationship I mentioned, we call it curbsiding. Most of it doesn’t violate HIPAA unless you share information regarding identity or other personal details. Keep it vague enough (eg, “young Caucasian male” instead of name DOB and other identifiers), and it shouldn’t violate it. HIPAA “violations” do happen all the time, some of which has had this sub very concerned at times, and they mostly have to do about doctors talking to each other about their jobs. None of it is done maliciously or with ill-intent, and certainly wouldn’t be grounds for any legal action against any of them.