Baby pictures at doctor’s office? Cute, sure, but illegal

Pictures of smiling babies crowd a bulletin board in a doctor’s office in midtown Manhattan, in a collage familiar to anyone who has given birth. But the women coming in to have babies of their own cannot see them. They have been moved to a private part of the office, replaced in the corridors with abstract art.

“I’ve had patients ask me, ‘Where’s your baby board?'” said Dr. Mark V. Sauer, director of the office, which is affiliated with Columbia University Medical Center. “We just tell them the truth, which is that we no longer post them because of concerns over privacy.”

For generations, obstetricians and midwives across America have proudly posted photographs of the babies they have delivered on their office walls. But this pre-digital form of social media is gradually going the way of cigars in the waiting room, because of the federal patient privacy law known as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

Under the law, baby photos are a type of protected health information, no less than a medical chart, birth date or Social Security number, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Even if a parent sends in the photo, it is considered private unless the parent also sends written authorization for its posting, which almost no one does.

So doctors have been stripping down the walls or, as Sauer did at the Center for Women’s Reproductive Care, hiding the photos, often with a bit of sadness.

While privacy is a virtue, the doctors say, the law could make more sensitive distinctions.

“For me, the face of a baby, that is really an anonymous face,” said Dr. Pasquale Patrizio, director of the Yale Fertility Center in New Haven, Connecticut. “It was representative of so much happiness, so much comfort, so much reassurance. It is purely a clinical office now.”

Although his center no longer displays the photos, parents insist on sending them in, Patrizio said.

“We are scanning them and leaving them in their own charts – their encrypted charts,” he said, chuckling.

Downtown Women OB/GYN Associates, in the New York City neighborhood of SoHo, took down its baby wall several years ago. But staff members were flummoxed when a patient posted a picture of her baby on the office Facebook page. Was that OK?

“I think we ultimately did take it down,” Alex Dettmer, the practice manager, said. “One of our compliance companies said, you might as well play it safe.”

Most people know HIPAA as the law responsible for the “Notice of Privacy Practices,” the blizzard of forms given to patients to sign, informing them of the ways in which their protected health information may be used. The law was enacted in 1996, but the banishment of baby photos has accelerated since 2009, when an economic bill provided money to promote electronic health records and let the government step up enforcement of the rules.

Rachel Seeger, a spokeswoman for the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services, confirmed that the displays were illegal.

“A patient’s photograph that identifies him/her cannot be posted in public areas” unless there is “specific authorization from the patient or personal representative,” she wrote in an e-mail.

This story was originally published August 9, 2014 at 6:39 PM with the headline "Baby pictures at doctor’s office? Cute, sure, but illegal."