Harrold-Jones v. Drury

WINFREE, Justice.

I. INTRODUCTION

We granted this petition for review to consider how the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)-establishing medical privacy standards with specific exceptions-affected our personal injury case law allowing a defendant ex parte contact with a plaintiff's doctors as a method of informal discovery. We requested that the parties specifically brief whether the federal law preempted our case law, or, if not, whether federal law otherwise required us to overrule or modify our case law. We conclude that the federal law does not…