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wtf: At Least 50 Northwestern Hospital Employees Fired for Accessing Smollett’s Profile, Records
- Thread starter Brawly Likes to Brawl
- Start date
Big hospitals have thousands of employees, hospital systems have 10's of thousands of employees, they'll be fine.
I'm guessing it was 50 people over a wide range of departments.
They accessed his chart with no reason to, it doesn't matter how much they looked at.
Healthcare workers have to recertify for HIPAA every year. You literally have to take a class that says "DONT DO THAT".
So yeah, these people are idiots.
Nurses aren't doctors.
Many people have access to the records system, including medical assistants and technicians. Scheduling and billing people have access. So do managers and research staff.
Doctors probably care the most, considering they have the most responsibility in cases like this. The story itself only mentions 2 nurses.
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If those people are willing to break the law over curiosity about a celebrity, they'll probably break the same law when an ex-boyfriend / girlfriend comes in for treatment. The celebrities serve as a useful honeypot to weed out the untrustworthy.
The only thing that protects peoples information... is not being famous and even then people are still "you won't believe what this patient..."
Was the same stories of friends who worked at credit card companies and would look up celebrities and their purchases all the time until they had to lock it down.
Stuff like HIPAA or "privacy" means fucking nothing when people are curious. The people who get caught and fired for such abuses are the vast minority of people who gleefully will look through your medical records and charts for gruesome pics and what not.
Was the same stories of friends who worked at credit card companies and would look up celebrities and their purchases all the time until they had to lock it down.
Stuff like HIPAA or "privacy" means fucking nothing when people are curious. The people who get caught and fired for such abuses are the vast minority of people who gleefully will look through your medical records and charts for gruesome pics and what not.
A patient could literally die in the time it takes for an admin to change privileges.
PPI is paradoxically too important to be easily accessible but benefits strongly from being easily accessible in an industry where time is of the essence and people can be quickly shuffled around. HIPAA allows this free-flowing system to exist while placing the onus on employee discipline to prevent abuse.
Absolutely the correct decision, going by the article. People are among their most vulnerable when they visiting hospitals and they absolutely don't need to have to deal with the worry that hospitals staff are acting with anything but the utmost professionalism.
Straight up fear mongering.
I'm a doctor and I've worked in numerous hospitals. No one is going through everyone's chart looking at pictures. No one has time for that. The vast majority of healthcare workers take their jobs seriously, and that includes privacy.
I've seen people fired simply for looking at a friend/family member's chart. These electronic medical record systems have automated flagging for people doing things funny.
Anonymized pictures ARE used in educational activities, such as morbidity and mortality conferences where we discuss things that went wrong or could have been done better during patient care. These sorts of uses are legally allowed and very necessary to educate other health care professionals and improve patient care quality.
Are there abuses of the system? Yeah, a few, here and there. That's true of any system, any system. But it's not the norm, not even close.
I got fired from a call centre for having my phone in my pocket within the office. However admittedly that's because I was too honest to lie to their face when asked during a random check.
I work in medical claims billing. I hear about shit all the time.
At the hospital I work at we have what's called "break the glass". Whenever a high profile medical record is pulled up, before you can access it, you have to state the reason you are accessing it and electronically sign.
Anyone who accesses and shouldn'tbe accessing, gets automatically fired.
So there are some protections in place for celebs and high profile people to make double sure people don't go reading their stuff. At least at the hospital I work at
And I'm a doctor and in 4 years of being in hospitals taking care of patients I've never seen any health care worker just randomly looking through charts. Does it happen? Yeah, there are a few stories out there. Is it common? Not at all.
I work on medical software. We log basically everything a user does and it never gets deleted to comply with HIPAA. You might not get caught looking into someone who isn't famous, but that record will last forever.
This. Anyone in the medical field will tell you this is the real deal. If you ignore HIPAA, no matter how little the offense, that's on you. Grown adults should know how to rise above the gossip and rumors by this point instead of constantly wanting to be a part of it.
I hope violating someone else's privacy which you have legally sworn to uphold was worth losing your job over. Morons.
How Fing stupid of them, hope it was worth it. Now that hospital and patients will suffer from short staffing ugh
At hospitals? Maybe not, in offices where you are totally unconnected with any face to face interactions with patients and are just some rube in a sea of cubicles who gets bored? I'd wager a lot more than you'd think.
So people who aren't healthcare workers, just anyone with access to the EMR? Well, ok.
Then just like the nurses in the stories, they're idiots and putting their jobs at risk.
How would they even know where to start looking for pictures in charts though? Just look through everyone?
I guess its how you define "healthcare worker" I would argue the people who are billing your medical claims and has access to your information are health care workers as well.
Depends on the system I guess but you just search. Was the same when I worked tech support or friend who worked credit card stuff, can just search.
In terms of the pictures, usually its something they should be working on but "oh this picture is fucking nuts!"
They could have done what most nurses do, have their specific nurse pull up the file and everyone just gathers around the screen instead of a bunch of different people accessing it. Like it or not, when there is a famous person on the floor this is what happens.
HIPAA is a federal law. Any organization that handles health info has to follow it, public or private.
Working in health insurance....yeah HIPAA is no joke. You could get fucked for so much shit. They should have known better. Way to throw your career away.
At my job I'm in charge of sanctions on providers and reviewing cases brought up in state. It may not be the norm, but it's not exactly minimal either.
Yup already said its HIPAA. We in health care have been told over and over not to do this. These people can also each be sued as well. And I believe receive a 2000 fine as well.
I'd like to hear some general numbers, if you can share them.
Knowing how many cable boxes Seinfeld has isn't nearly as profitable as knowing his medical records
They knew better and choose to do it regardless of the consequences. Hospitals take patient confidentiality very seriously. I don't feel sorry for them.
I worked on prison phone systems for a few years and they blocked certain celebrity (and notorious criminals) calls from being accessed. This started when someone accessed Paris Hilton's calls in my office and may have sold things to the pap. I remember being strictly told to stay away from the jails Michael Vick and Hulk Hogan (or was it his kid?) were in "just in case".
Now I just deal with billing. I've had Bill Nye and Robert "T-1000" Patrick read me their credit card numbers.
Now I just deal with billing. I've had Bill Nye and Robert "T-1000" Patrick read me their credit card numbers.
You can get fired for even looking up your own/ or families records/charts, it's a giant No No. not surprised
It's possible they were maybe only using a read only screen or directory? Could be less security.
I know that, which is why I said it is required by law for hospitals. HIPPA doesn't apply to all PII though (just medical records), but it is still a firing offense at many companies that are not covered by HIPPA.
Has everyone skipped over the fact someone in this thread accessed private information at their workplace to see how many cable boxes Jerry Seinfeld has.
Regarding the medical staff, good. HIPAA violations are serious and I'm glad action was taken immediately. HIPAA is in place for a reason and no matter who you are you should expect the utmost privacy with your medical history.
Regarding the medical staff, good. HIPAA violations are serious and I'm glad action was taken immediately. HIPAA is in place for a reason and no matter who you are you should expect the utmost privacy with your medical history.
Idiots. Not only is HIPAA drilled into the heads of everybody that works in these fields, but so is the fact that everything you do is electronically tracked.
Oh boy, where to start.
Well there was this guy who wanted a sandwich...
beyond deserved, lmao
they shouldn't be looking up some serial killer's private medical info if they aren't involved with their care, never mind this moron
they shouldn't be looking up some serial killer's private medical info if they aren't involved with their care, never mind this moron
Interesting, my hospital org uses Epic as well and I've only ever seen break the glass used for psych purposes.
You can set up BTG in all sorts of ways. I've seen it done with patient classes, sexual assault documentation or just a VIP. it's up to how your org wants to leverage it.
we actually go one step further and feed our EMR logs to another system that uses AI to identify breaches prematurely - family members, coworkers, people who live on your street, etc. these things happen all the time when humans are involved.
we actually go one step further and feed our EMR logs to another system that uses AI to identify breaches prematurely - family members, coworkers, people who live on your street, etc. these things happen all the time when humans are involved.
Yeah, some people are (rightfully, apparently) paranoid about accessing Epic at my job since we usually only have an ancillary need to use it. In a way it sucks because when I do need to use it, I don't know a lot of its functions/navigation and nobody else around me knows either. Then I end up spending extra time looking for what I need and it's all being logged that I'm clicking all these extraneous pages… 😰
Yep. I can theoretically commit straight up wanton murder in the operating room and my hospital's lawyers will defend me in court. I violate HIPAA, I'm on my own.
Maybe not in this example, but I personally know one doctor who was terminated immediately due to violating patient privacy.
My tip to you: the search bar in the top right corner is extremely helpful. It will search the entire patient chart for whatever you enter. If you are not in a patient chart, you can use to to search for different activities associated with your account without digging through a dozen sub-menus.
Signed, your friendly IT pharmacist.
Yup, fucking around with personal info at pretty much any job that handles personal information is fireable.