I am not surprised this happened:  15 medical workers at California’s Kaiser Permanente Medical Center were fired, and 8 were disciplined, for violating HIPAA regulations for peaking at Octo Mom’s medical records.  It appears no information was leaked to the media.  It is currently unknown what type of employees were fired and what ones were only disciplined.  I am curious as to why some were fired and others “disciplined”.  My guess is that the eight employees who were “disciplined” were doctors, and the 15 who were fired were nurses and/or ancillary staff.   Just an educated guess based on hospital administration status quo.

Anyone who has worked in a hospital or health care for the last five years has had HIPAA regulations jammed down their throats.  It cracks me up seeing stories of hospital workers reading the electronic medical records   of celebrities (George Clooney, Farah Fawcett, Britney Spears etc).  You are being stupid, and you will be caught.  I wonder if it was worth it for those 15, now unemployed workers at Kaiser.  Could it have been that interesting reading about Octo Mom’s C/S operative note, or fundus checks, or care plan?  Most medical charts are relatively boring and dry.  Unless there is a note by Social Work, those tend to be fascinating.

It makes me wonder why it was so easy for those workers to breech the EMR of such a high profile patient. There should be a way to only allow access to Octo Mom’s primary care providers and no one else. I am not forgiving those employees for purposely violating HIPAA, but come on, some of this is just human nature.  Their curiosity got the best of them, and now they are receiving unemployment checks, just like Octo Mom herself.

This to me is an example of the hugely flawed EMR system.  There has been a huge push and vast amounts of money allocated by the current presidential administration to promote EMRs.   I am all for advances in technology, but not at throwing money at a currently flawed system.  Electronic Medical Records needs to be starting from scratch.  I heard of some systems which are very efficient and easy to use, I personally have not been introduced to these yet.

If there are any tech-geeks reading this post (highly doubtful I know.  I can’t compete with engadget) let me know what EMR technologies are being developed.  Is there something out there now that is easy to use?

RR