Release MCP billing information: privacy commissioner
The Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association has alerted its members of the commissioner’s recommendation and will review the report with legal counsel before deciding its next course of action.
The province’s privacy commissioner has recommended that details of MCP billings — including physicians’ names, specialties and the amount they billed — should be made public.
Friday’s recommendation from commissioner Donovan Molloy came following an access to information request in April to the Department of Health and Community Services.
The request sought details on “all MCP billings listed by physician for either calendar year 2015 or fiscal year 2015-16.”
That information covered 1,407 fee-for-service physicians — listed by name and specialty along with their billing information.
In response, the department — believing disclosure of the information might be an unreasonable invasion of privacy under Section 40 of the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act — contacted the affected doctors via a newsletter in May, alerting them to the access request.
“The department received several hundred submissions from physicians in response to the third-party notice, as well as a response from the NLMA (Newfoundland and Labrador Medical Association). The vast majority of the responses objected to the disclosure. Thirteen consented to the disclosure. Many of the physicians who responded set out, in some detail, arguments about the harm that they asserted could or would result from the disclosure of the billings,” Molloy’s report reads.
“During the first three weeks of June 2016 this office also received 18 complaints from individual physicians in response to the department’s thirdparty notice, as well as a complaint from the NLMA on be- half of several hundred member physicians.”
As Molloy’s office began reviewing the complaints, the department announced on June 22 it would not release the information, concluding it would be an unreasonable invasion of privacy.
The original applicant looking for the information filed a complaint the next day with Molloy’s office formally objecting to the department’s decision to withhold the information.
After investigating the case, Molloy has recommended the department release the information to the applicant.
Molloy concluded the information was not personal information within the meaning of the act.
He also concluded, “in the alternative, that if the information was personal information, then the physicians fall into the category of persons retained under a contract to provide services for a public body, under Section 2, and therefore disclosure of their remuneration was deemed not to be an unreasonable invasion of personal privacy under Subsection 40(2).”
The full report from Molloy can be seen at www.oipc.nl.ca/ reports/commissioner.
Meanwhile, the NLMA has alerted its members of the commissioner’s recommendation and will review the report with legal counsel before deciding its next course of action.
In a letter to members, NLMA president Christopher Cox restated the association’s position that the Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act did not address the circumstances of fee-for-service physicians.
“If the Department of Health and Community Services decides to challenge the commissioner’s recommendations, it must file an appeal to the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador, Trial Division within 10 days. If the department, instead, decides not to appeal to the court, the NLMA has the option to make an appeal on its own,” Cox wrote.