I work for a medical office and I am the historian. My employers are going to outsource the histories to a company in Nicaragua. For training purposes, they wish to record me taking histories and do not want to tell the patient. I have a big problem with this. As far as I can tell, it is not legal for anyone in the State of California to record anyone without permission. The information in the histories is very personal and sensitive. Please let me know if I am correct in this.

Thank you.

I'll let someone else answer specifically about CA laws on recording conversations. But I can look at this from a HIPAA standpoint.

Any recording of an interaction with a patient is considered Protected Health Information (PHI). This PHI could be in the form of written documentation, electronic documentation, audio/video recordings, and other media like X-rays, etc. But it is all part of the person's medical record and subject to all protections under HIPAA.

Your medical office must have a Notice of Privacy Practices that explains to patients how their PHI will be used and disclosed. If a medical entity uses PHI internally for educational purposes, this must be included in the notice of privacy practices. The notice should also include some type of statement about the patient having the right to request restrictions on the use of their PHI.

The patient also has a right to review all of their PHI (with very few exceptions), so there cannot be any "secret" records on the patient. These audio recordings would be considered this type of "secret" record. Some practitioners have attempted to keep "secret" supplemental notes on patients for various reasons, but these are subject to discovery, and can be subpoenaed or court-ordered in the course of an investigation. So these secret records can not be treated by a healthcare provider like they do not exist.

I don't know about CA's laws regarding privacy of healthcare info, but most states have provisions that are even more stringent than HIPAA. And knowing CA's approach to other types of laws, I'd expect them to have even more protections for patients than the federal requirements.