Overzealous HIPAA adherence?? Sounds that way:

Hipaa was designed to allow Americans to take their health insurance coverage with them when they changed jobs, with provisions to keep medical information confidential. But new studies have found that some health care providers apply Hipaa regulations overzealously, leaving family members, caretakers, public health and law enforcement authorities stymied in their efforts to get information.
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Hipaa misinterpretations, some alarming, some annoying:

¶Birthday parties in nursing homes in New York and Arizona have been canceled for fear that revealing a resident’s date of birth could be a violation.

¶Patients were assigned code names in doctor’s waiting rooms — say, “Zebra” for a child in Newton, Mass., or “Elvis” for an adult in Kansas City, Mo. — so they could be summoned without identification.

¶Nurses in an emergency room at St. Elizabeth Health Center in Youngstown, Ohio, refused to telephone parents of ailing students themselves, insisting a friend do it, for fear of passing out confidential information, the hospital’s patient advocate said.

¶State health departments throughout the country have been slowed in their efforts to create immunization registries for children, according to Dr. James J. Gibson, the director of disease control in South Carolina, because information from doctors no longer flows freely.

Teaching staff to protect records is easier than teaching them to share them, said Robert N. Swidler, general counsel for Northeast Health, a nonprofit network in Troy, N.Y., that includes several hospitals.

HIPAA web site