I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt.
As I understand it, it's legally best to get signed papers from the people involved, or limit filming to public places. But there are ways to broadcast something even if it was filmed in a private area and you don't have permission of the person filmed. The most obvious thing to do is to blur out the person's face, which the show did here. I believe that there is an exception for "hot news" items (although this obviously didn't involve hot news) and there are always obvious arguments about freedom of the press.
This is mainly an area of state law, so the rules will be different across the US. The two big issues are right of publicity and right of privacy ( http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/publicity , http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Privacy ). The hospital is apparently arguing that New York's right of publicity doesn't cover this case. I have no idea if that is correct.
HIPAA also comes into the picture (federal law, with many similar state laws). I'm certainly no expert on HIPAA, but it seems to me that the obvious argument would be that the hospital didn't release any private medical information, and if the hospital is held responsible for information revealed by the show, the "medical information" was along the lines of "he's dead" and not "he has an STD that he'd prefer to keep private."
This is a case where it's asking how the law applies, how the law should apply, and what kind of reaction the general public should have. The show was certainly insensitive to the family, and the hospital's reputation should take a severe hit. And that applies regardless of what laws might have been broken.
I am also not a lawyer. But I did once work in a health-related field and had to go through HIPAA compliance training. And the general issue is that simply blurring out a face isn't enough.
The definition of Protected Health Information (PHI) is interpreted broadly, such that the fact that a patient was in the ER due to an accident, received certain types of treatment and died is protected.
Meanwhile, the definition of what is personally identifiable (i.e., ties information about condition/treatment to a specific person) includes an 18-point list of potential identifiers; responsible practice is to remove all of these prior to making information public. That 18-point list includes both the geographic location of the treatment (should not be given in any form more specific than the state) and the date of treatment (should not be given in a form more specific than the year).
So I can see a strong argument that the hospital is on the wrong side of HIPAA here. And given that their argument seems mostly to be "it wasn't Our Hospital Medical Services, Inc., it was Our Hospital TV News Productions, Inc., and that one isn't covered by HIPAA", I'd begin to suspect they believe it would be a HIPAA violation for the hospital, too.
As I understand it, it's legally best to get signed papers from the people involved, or limit filming to public places. But there are ways to broadcast something even if it was filmed in a private area and you don't have permission of the person filmed. The most obvious thing to do is to blur out the person's face, which the show did here. I believe that there is an exception for "hot news" items (although this obviously didn't involve hot news) and there are always obvious arguments about freedom of the press.
This is mainly an area of state law, so the rules will be different across the US. The two big issues are right of publicity and right of privacy ( http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/publicity , http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Privacy ). The hospital is apparently arguing that New York's right of publicity doesn't cover this case. I have no idea if that is correct.
HIPAA also comes into the picture (federal law, with many similar state laws). I'm certainly no expert on HIPAA, but it seems to me that the obvious argument would be that the hospital didn't release any private medical information, and if the hospital is held responsible for information revealed by the show, the "medical information" was along the lines of "he's dead" and not "he has an STD that he'd prefer to keep private."
This is a case where it's asking how the law applies, how the law should apply, and what kind of reaction the general public should have. The show was certainly insensitive to the family, and the hospital's reputation should take a severe hit. And that applies regardless of what laws might have been broken.