Confidentiality for SUD records: Final rule issued

A week after the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a final rule liberalizing treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) in opioid treatment programs, it issued a less patient‐friendly rule. ADAW has written about 400 articles on confidentiality and substance use disorder treatment, an area that has seen continued erosion since 2010 when the government started acceding to claims that requiring a patient to consent to the release of his or her substance use disorder (SUD) treatment information in a digital age (think “Electronic Health Record”) would be just too inconvenient. The most recent step came in the Federal Register issued Feb. 8, which changes the confidentiality rules to align with those of HIPAA. The rule, through the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), finalized modifications to the Confidentiality of Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Patient Records regulations at 42 CFR part 2 (“Part 2”), which protect the privacy of patients' SUD treatment records. In a press release about the rule, HHS said this: “Specifically, today's final rule increases coordination among providers treating patients for SUDs, strengthens confidentiality protections through civil enforcement, and enhances integration of behavioral health information with other medical records to improve patient health outcomes.”