There’s a great New York Times story today (registration may be required) about how the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is both misunderstood and misinterpreted by nurses and other health care professionals. The result is that family and friends of patients frequently can’t get basic information they need and are stymied by a system that seems bent on emphasizing secrecy and confidentiality at all costs.

From the NYT story by Jane Gross: “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.

“Experts say many providers do not understand the law, have not trained their staff members to apply it judiciously, or are fearful of the threat of fines and jail terms—although no penalty has been levied in four years. Some reports blame the language of the law itself, which says health care providers may share information with others unless the patient objects, but does not require them to do so. Thus, disclosures are voluntary and health care providers are left with broad discretion.”

But here’s the part that really caught my eye in the NYT story: “Susan McAndrew, deputy director of health information privacy at the Department of Health and Human Services, said that problems were less frequent than they once had been but that health care providers continued to hide behind the law. ‘Either innocently or purposefully, entities often use this as an excuse,’ she said. ‘They say “HIPAA made me do it” when, in fact, they chose for other reasons not to make the permitted disclosures.’ ”

This kind of thinking is all too common, especially among managers and HR people. Too often they choose to hide behind “rules” that they misinterpret or misuse in an attempt to keep from being completely truthful and honest with workers. Their default position is that they are legally prohibited from talking, when in fact that may not be the case.

I’ve encountered this behavior on many occasions, but one sticks out. A respected longtime employee leaves suddenly and co-workers don’t know why. Senior management and the HR department won’t talk about it, leaving the impression among the remaining workforce that the respected longtime employee may have been fired because they did something terrible. Weeks later, someone finally connects with the departed employee and finds out the real reason for the departure—a health emergency within the departed employee’s extended family. When the word spreads among concerned co-workers, everyone wonders aloud, “Why couldn’t management be a little more open rather than leaving us hanging and thinking the worst?”

It’s a good question I don’t have an answer for. In my book, management does itself no favors by being so secretive. If I were a CEO, I’d push my HR people and senior managers to work as hard as possible to be as transparent and open as possible all the time. There are always some things that need to be kept secret, but the fewer there are, the better the company will ultimately be.

Whatever happened to the notion of shared sacrifice, of workers and management both sharing in the pain and hardship it takes to get a money-losing business back on track? Well, the concept is a good one, but at Northwest Airlines, it seems to be at the core of all that is wrong with the business right now.

Northwest has been canceling flights at a pretty good clip—more than 1,000 in the past week. The ongoing bad weather in the middle of the country is partly to blame, but the main culprit is a coordinated move by Northwest’s pilots to only fly the 90 hours per month required under their labor contract with the airline. Generally, pilots fly more—the FAA allows 100 hours—but the pilots at Northwest have decided to stick to the letter of the contract and do only what they are contractually obligated to do and not any more.

The pilots, who took about a big pay cut in their last contract and saw hundreds of their fellow pilots furloughed, are upset that Northwest executives received large bonuses when the airline finally came out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy this spring. Last week, they passed a resolution expressing “no confidence” in Northwest management. Pilots at other airlines, notably United and American, are equally upset with management, and it’s possible the problems at Northwest are just the beginning for summer travelers.

Contrast the Northwest battle with what happened at Delta Air Lines when it came out of bankruptcy in March. As I noted at the time in this blog (”The Art of Management Spin and Positioning,” March 8), Delta management gave numerous pay raises and stock when it emerged from bankruptcy to reward rank-and-file workers for their efforts in helping to get the carrier back on track.

Delta CEO Gerald Grinstein understood, as all managers should, that workers are more than willing to sacrifice for the good of the company as long as they are recognized for that sacrifice and see some payback when things get better. Delta management gets this. Northwest clearly doesn’t.

In addition, Northwest’s management doesn’t seem to care about its best customers either. Get a load of this post by a Northwest frequent flier on the Detroit Free Press Web site:

“My wife flew NWA to Phoenix and was to return home two days ago. She has been stuck in a flea-bag hotel for the past two days near the PHX airport because of a pilot shortage, and may finally be able to get home sometime today. She is Platinum Elite with NWA and flies many, many miles a year for business. Now we must re-assess her relationship with Northwest. What would you do? Can anyone afford to be stuck someplace for days at a time? She will be looking for other carriers in the future. I hate to say this, but NWA is a major employer in the Detroit area … and they are shooting themselves in the foot with this foolishness. If they go bust, they deserve it, but it will cost the area lots of jobs.”