User Confidentiality Agreement And: Fill & Download for Free

Not without risking a legal fight that they will likely lose.This issue first came to our attention when we started getting DMCA takedown notices from doctors and dentists claiming that they owned a copyright interest in the reviews written by their patients. Not surprisingly, they were only interested in taking down negative reviews and leaving the positive ones up, so copyright interests had nothing to do with the reality of the situation: many health care professionals are simply uncomfortable being graded by their patients.The theory goes that patients don’t really understand the complexities of medicine, the challenges of working within the insurance system, and the time constraints imposed on doctors, so it’s unreasonable for them to voice their views. This theory is similar to the one we sometimes hear from chefs who insist that their critics don’t know anything about food. They’re right in some ways: most people aren’t expert chefs or doctors. But they’re still having legitimate and highly subjective consumer experiences. Sometimes they are delighted, and sometimes they are let down, and it may have nothing to do with the artistry of the food in the case of the chef or the brilliance of the surgeon in the case of the doctor.(Malcolm Gladwell touches on this point in Blink, in which he explains that the doctors who get sued the most aren’t the doctors who make the most mistakes. Instead, it’s the doctors who provide a crummy consumer experience. "What comes up again and again in malpractice cases is that patients say they were rushed or ignored or treated poorly.")In any event, we ultimately traced these DMCA takedown notices to a group called Medical Justice, which was peddling an “enhanced” confidentiality agreement which purported to prohibit patients from writing reviews on sites like Yelp and/or to assign the copyright interest in any reviews that patients wrote to their healthcare provider. We all thought it was quite clever at first glance.But these agreements are unenforceable for a host of reasons. We used to use them as an issue-spotting test for attorneys who were interested in working at Yelp – I think we counted at least a dozen significant legal problems. Some were rooted in pure contract law, others in copyright law, and still others in privacy law. At the end of the day, the real question is whether it makes sense as a matter of public policy to allow businesses to prohibit their customers from talking about them. Most folks would say no.As a practical matter, these businesses aren’t going to get very far with Yelp: we won’t take down reviews that are the subject of these agreements, and we're happy to educate any user about their rights on this topic. This issue is currently being litigated by a yelper in New York who decided to challenge one of these agreements in late 2011. After the suit was filed, Medical Justice quickly announced that it was retiring its enhanced confidentiality agreements (see article here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/11/patient-sues-dentist-over-gag-order-causing-medical-justice-to-drop-it/). We haven’t seen many of them since...UPDATE: The case in NY that I mentioned above was just recently decided, and the judge reached the same conclusion: Bad dentist must pay $4,677 for threats over Yelp review.

I’ve refused a couple NDAs and confidentiality agreements out of the hundreds I’ve signed that bury ridiculous penalty clauses deep in the text.Most people sign these without even scanning the contents, but on one where I was less lazy than normal I was thumbing through the document and saw a clause that jumped off the page (despite being embedded in droll boilerplate.)Basically, the confidentiality terms bound me to pay the startup I was advising a penalty of $5,000,000 for each disclosure or “appropriation” of their intellectual property or proprietary information… which they defined as everything set forth in the documents I was to receive (or learned in conversation).These agreements aren’t enforced or enforceable in most jurisdictions. But a vindictive and lawyered-up IP holder who’s willing to drop $100k on legal fees can make life miserable for those of us who retain lawyers but prefer not to rack up six figures in billing fighting a frivolous case.If I had signed the paper and things went south, there were a dozen elements of their “intellectual property” definition that many of us prefer to think of as “industry standards” and best practices.Assuming I breached 6 of their gems (2FA… XML data structures?), I could have been stuck fighting a $30 million civil action for months or years.So I didn’t sign theirs. I pulled up a balanced general NDA template in Acrobat, which after some grumbling they consented to sub for their odious mess.

Tom’s answer is spot on. The confidentiality agreements that EPIC customers sign and the secretive nature of the company culture guarantee that you will not find any tutorial. This physician user FAQ published by Providence Health system provides some background context. EpicCare Link | Frequently Asked Questions - Providence Washingtonhttps://washington.providence.org/~/media/files/providence/hospitals/wa/phc/epic/phc_epic_faqs.pdf/