People mistakenly believe HIPAA is about patient privacy. It’s true that there is a relatively minor section of the law that deals with that, and it usually gets enforced rigorously. But the vast majority of the law is actually about how to share medical information electronically between all the entities that need it, such as insurers, Medicare and Medicaid, billing companies,electronic medical record vendors, and other third party business associates.
There really is no way to do medicine these days without an electronic medical record system. And they have to be connected to the internet for many reasons, including all the things I mentioned in the previous paragraph, but also because of the distributed nature of how medical care is delivered, the need for a patient’s medical information to be accessible in different locations by multiple care providers, technical support, the location of the data center, and many other reasons.
The days of your medical record being a physical folder stored in the bowels of the hospital are long gone, only to return after the EMP, and then only until society recovers enough to do it again.
You nailed it.