Doctors and dentists tell patients, "all your review are belong to us"

[Newsjock]

Source: Ars Technica

When I walked into the offices of Dr. Ken Cirka, I was looking for cleaner teeth, not material for an Ars Technica story. I needed a new dentist, and Yelp says Dr. Cirka is one of the best in the Philadelphia area. The receptionist handed me a clipboard with forms to fill out. After the usual patient information form, there was a "mutual privacy agreement" that asked me to transfer ownership of any public commentary I might write in the future to Dr. Cirka. Surprised and a little outraged by this, I got into a lengthy discussion with Dr. Cirka's office manager that ended in me refusing to sign and her showing me the door.

The agreement is based on a template supplied by an organization called Medical Justice, and similar agreements have been popping up in doctors' offices across the country. And although Medical Justice and Dr. Cirka both claim otherwise, it seems pretty obvious that the agreements are designed to help medical professionals censor their patients' reviews.

The legal experts we talked to said that the copyright provisions of these agreements are probably toothless. But the growing use of these agreements is still cause for concern. Patients who sign the agreements may engage in self-censorship in the erroneous belief that the agreements bar them from speaking out. And in any event, the fact that a doctor would try to gag his patients raises serious questions about his judgment.

... The agreement that Dr. Cirka's staff asked me to sign on that February morning began by claiming to offer stronger privacy protections than those guaranteed by HIPAA, the 1996 law that governs patient privacy in the United States. In exchange for this extra dollop of privacy, it asked me to "exclusively assign all Intellectual Property rights, including copyrights" to "any written, pictorial, and/or electronic commentary" I might make about Dr. Cirka's services, including on "web pages, blogs, and/or mass correspondence," to Dr. Cirka. It also stipulated that if Dr. Cirka were to sue me due to a breach of the agreement, the prevailing party in the litigation will pay the loser's legal fees.

Read more: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/05/all-your-reviews-are-belong-to-us-medical-justice-vs-patient-free-speech.ars

[Deep13]

1. That's bullshit!

My feeling is that if a doc is afraid of an Angie's List review, it's because he or she has reason to be.

[Coyote_Bandit]

2. Insurance companies are not the only bad boys

in our fucked up healthcare system.

The doctors certainly bears their own share of responsibility - though their god complex prevents them from recogniziing it.

[RT Atlanta]

3. Not sure of medical ethics

But that would seem to fall within something that is prohibited by the appropriate ethical rules. This seems analogous (but not precisely on point) to prohibitions on attorneys having clients waive a claim for legal malpractice against the attorney in their engagement letter - this type of prospective waive is typically prohibited by the applicable bar rules. Wonder if there's something similar in the medical profession?