"The 33 hospitals The Markup found sending patient appointment details to Facebook collectively reported more than 26 million patient admissions and outpatient visits in 2020."

"The authors document how there has been a tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ private website pages, which have been collecting patients’ health information. This includes medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments."

Legally they can do that. There's nothing that stops a hospital from giving out how many admissions or outpatient visit stats. They can give out how many people were there because they had a stroke, fell and injured themselves, car accident, etc., they can list what prescriptions they prescribe daily, weekly, monthly even but what they can't do is give out who that information involved, in other words any personally identifiable information.

It wouldn't or doesn't surprise me the health department has that information either as they are funded by the government for programs that help reduce or offer programs in area's prone for higher rates or incidences of certain diseases. I am sure the CDC has a tracker also as you can go to their site and look up the data on just about anything. Again, letting the information highway collect that data is not the same as giving out personally identifiable information it just makes it an efficient way to collect data that'd otherwise take years to track. Yes there is nothing stopping them from making money off letting FB and Google gather stats either, it's perfectly legal as long as they don't give out your personal info.
Doesn't surprise me ol' Bob needed something to write about, appears he's finally found a hitch that's profitable for him because sticking peanut butter in some chocolate didn't work out to well for him.