Woman sues hospital for posting her STD test results on facebook leading to harassment

[Stonepounder]

43. The people who did this are toast.

They are criminally liable for violating HIPPA which is a Federal statute and carries criminal penalties. They are also civlally liable, individually and together. The big question is the hospital's liability. It is not a given that the hospital shares liability. That depends on the facts. What kind of audits does the hospital have in place to catch HIPPA violations? Are all employees aware of HIPPA and the consequences of violating it? Etc.

I worked in the medical software industry for about 15 years until I retired and was around when HIPPA came in. It was a massive headache from a programming point of view, since it basically says you have to be able to audit everything. Who touched a record, when, why, what did they do, etc. We had levels of security authorization from the head nurse who could look at the records of anyone on her wing, to individual nurses who could only look at their own patients, to who could look, who could enter, who could change, what times of day were they authorized for. Every time a record was touched for any reason, an audit record was generated. And even with all that we disclaimers on our software that we did not claim that it was fully HIPPA compliant. (And this was software that started at about $1,000,000 per hospital and went up from there.) I do know, however, that it was banged into our heads from the very beginning that we were all considered under HIPPA regulations and that if we were caught breaking any of the privacy rules we were out the door in a heatbeat and don't ask for references.

In this instance, if there was a nurse involved who, as part of her regular duties, was expected to access the patient's chart, and who then decided to knowingly violate both hospital policy and HIPPA, the hospital may be able to avoid a large part of the liability. My experience with hospitals is that they take HIPPA very seriously.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. If a nurse was actually involved, she will lose her license and will probably never get another job in health care again. It will also be interesting to see if the case stays civil or if state and/or federal prosecutors decide to get involved. personally, I would like to see the feds go after these lowlifes and make an example out of them. I'm not sure what the penalties for violating HIPPA are, but I would love to see the book thrown at these creeps.