The Janesville City Council will vote on a resolution at their next meeting Monday night to formally request the Rock County Public Health Department share location information about patients who test positive for COVID-19.
City Manager Mark Freitag and Fire Chief Ernie Rhodes are among the city leaders who have requested what they say is “non-confidential” information about coronavirus patients, to help the city with it’s emergency planning and operations.
The public health emergency declared by Rock County gives county health officer Marie-Noel Sandoval the authority to determine what protected health information is released and who should have access to it, under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Sandoval cites patient privacy as her justification for not releasing any location information to municipalities, first responders or the public.
Instead, she notifies the Rock County Communications Center of the location of each positive case, and the dispatching computer system will automatically notify police, firefighters and paramedics if the address they’re responding to matches with the address of a positive COVID-19 patient.
Sandoval is following the guidance from the state of Wisconsin as outlined in in Governor Tony Evers’ Emergency Order No. 19, but Janesville City Attorney Wald Klimczyk argued Sandoval has the legal right to share generalized patient locations with other HIPAA-covered entities like fire departments.
Milwaukee County publicly shares census tract COVID-19 locations
City leaders have pointed to other counties in Wisconsin which are sharing location data with the public. Milwaukee County’s COVID-19 information page includes an interactive map that shows the census tract locations of the county’s 1,461 total cases as of Wednesday night.
Other Wisconsin county health officers have opted to directly share the addresses of positive COVID-19 patients with all of their police and fire departments.
The city council’s proposed resolution requesting the location information argues Rock County health officials “have unnecessarily and inopportunely adopted an overly restrictive and unnecessarily ponderous interpretation and application
of, and untended by, HIPAA.”
Council president Rich Gruber said their vote will also include a formal request to legislative leaders to update state and federal laws to more clearly define the need for health officers to share health information to local government entities during emergencies.
