Curiosity Killed the Cat and Got 50 Hospital Employees Fired
At Chicago’s Northwestern Hospital, Jussie Smollett, an actor from the TV series “Empire,” was admitted after he was physically attacked. According to reports, he suffered bruises and facial lacerations.
Out of curiosity, over 50 hospital employees, including nurses, decided to check the celebrity's medical records. Many said they didn't go past the name screen but that was enough to be a HIPAA violation. Those individuals lost their jobs.
Anything that you do online in the hospital is trackable. You cannot access the medical records of anyone unless you are involved in that patient's care. Even being only on the face page for any amount of time as little as 17 seconds is a HIPAA violation if you are not involved in the care for that patient.
Audit Trails
Authorities can find your path if you wrongfully access a record because of what's called "audit trails.” The same rules apply if you are changing a medical record such as making a late entry and you will need to properly identify the late entry. Although you may be able to simply replace or add to your prior charting, this can be discovered.
Your employer or an attorney can go through the audit trails to see exactly how the records may have been changed. Cases which might pique an attorney's curiosity, such as a heel ulcer developed overnight and yet all the proper preventative records were checked that they were done in the medical record and sudden changes in condition. In these situations, an attorney may get the audit trail to show that the entries placed in the record were entered late after they knew of the heel ulcer or the change in condition.
Also, be careful when copying and pasting previous notes. Again, those actions can be tracked and the attorney may question whether you actually performed a new assessment.
What is HIPAA?
HIPAA established national standards to protect an individual's medical record as well as other personal health information. Patients' have the right to privacy for their medical records. Any intrusion into the medical records can result in a significant fine to the hospital. Therefore, most facilities have a zero tolerance policy if the privacy rights of any patient are violated. Improperly accessing records could result in termination as this is what happened to more the 50 health care workers at Northwestern.
With medical records and portability information, it is even more important nowadays to be aware of the rules to protect patients' privacy as well as protecting your license.
Privacy and confidentiality also are important when you are conversing with another health care professional outside of the medical area such as in elevators or while having lunch. You never know who may be listening. Even if you avoid using the patient's name, there may enough information revealed to identify the patient.
This is not the first time that a celebrity's medical information has been improperly accessed. Britney Spears was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit when several employees improperly accessed her records. They were all terminated.
Social media is another big issue. All attorneys advise not to post anything, zilch, about work on any of the social media. Again, you can never know all who may be reading your posts or who may even forward that information to other pages.
Violation of HIPAA may result in fines of from $100 to $50,000 per violations and up to $1,500,000.00 a year. Hospitals must designate a HIPAA officer to make sure that the hospital is in compliance.
According to the HIPAA Journal, the average HIPAA data breach costs an organization $5,900,000.00. This is astronomical! No wonder hospitals take this so seriously.
Do your part by never accessing patient information for which you are not authorized to do.
It depends on where you live. I live in Wyoming, and there 'is' a terrible nursing shortage here. I only wish I lived in a state where there isn't a nursing shortage, or wish some of those nurses would move here.
Have pay rates or benefits gotten better because of the shortage, or is there a shortage because of pay rates and benefits?
"Social media is another big issue. All attorneys advise not to post anything, zilch, about work on any of the social media. Again, you can never know all who may be reading your posts or who may even forward that information to other pages."
We post a lot of information here . . . how does this affect our 'anonymous' posts on AN?
"Social media is another big issue. All attorneys advise not to post anything, zilch, about work on any of the social media. Again, you can never know all who may be reading your posts or who may even forward that information to other pages."
We post a lot of information here . . . how does this affect our 'anonymous' posts on AN?
Nothing is anonymous online unless you are on 4Chan, even then it is only a degree of more anonymous.
I remember AN members being sued by a company that did not like their review a little while ago...
It depends on where you live. I live in Wyoming, and there 'is' a terrible nursing shortage here. I only wish I lived in a state where there isn't a nursing shortage, or wish some of those nurses would move here.
Interesting, 50 people is huge. I once checked my own records which I know is definitely not allowed. Not sure why I took the risk at the time but I couldn't get through to the doctor for days and just wanted to check.
Have pay rates or benefits gotten better because of the shortage, or is there a shortage because of pay rates and benefits?
Pay and benefits have improved. The problem is, one facility increases pay then the next facility increases pay and it is a vicious cycle. The same nurses go from one facility to the next chasing the dollar while the shortage continues.
Very interesting. The job market out there must be such that they can replace the 50 people very easily.
I wish! I work at this hospital and it’s actually fairly difficult to find very good nurses. A lot of people want to work at Northwestern because of the prestigious name (as I’m sure it is at other hospitals) and obviously people can interview very well so it’s tricky... nonetheless, lots of these people who were fired worked at our satellite branches and were not solely nurses on the main campus, otherwise we would have a huge problem (in a different way!) on our hands.
They could easily replace the 50 nurses with agency staff and then worry about the lack of permanence. There is a nursing shortage especially in critical care, ED, Nursing education and elsewhere. Oh sure there are nurses out there but the recent (last 5 years) influx of new nurses, has created an experience void that is difficult to overcome. "The optics of not replacing them" is the point of the firing not to mention the maintaining of integrity within a system. I accessed my girlfriends brothers' chart about 20 years ago and while I was not fired, I was placed on probation. The fella who said that he could not believe that anyone would not realize that each keystroke is monitored nowadays, hit the nail on the head. From "political correctness" to "freedom of speech and religion" our every action and interaction are monitored. Big Brother has truly arrived.
Very true on the “big brother” comment, truly not sure how people don’t recognize that or think that high profiled charts are going to be monitored. Although, I work at this hospital and it’s tougher than I would have imagined to find and hire great nurses. We have a large amount of agency already, some good and some not decent, and the effort it takes to train agency staff and not know how long they are going to be around is frustrating for staff nurses who are covering, as I’m sure everyone can imagine. Plus, Northwestern is very strict with their budgeting and we have to beg to get agency help sometimes. Luckily, not all the staff were from the same department, or even the same campus, because otherwise we would be in much more trouble!
This has been all over the news in Chicago...realistically, Northwestern can probably absorb losing the 50 employees (they weren't solely nurses) pretty quickly - it's a huge facility. I work at a nearby hospital now and we got a global email with the news link too from our privacy team, reminding everyone that curiosity doesn't cut it when it comes to peeking. Getting a quick familiarity with name and diagnosis of your co-worker's patients when you cover their lunch? Totally fine, and a good idea. You would be involved in their care. "I heard so-and-so might be on the telemetry unit?" Nope.
I work at Northwestern and I think it’s mindboggling people looked because during orientation, they drill it into our heads to not look at anyone’s chart who is not your patient or a patient you are covering. They also said, until just a few months ago, that we couldn’t access our own charts. Kind of cool they changed it now since a decent amount of other hospitals around us have done so, but even still, people are worried about looking given what has happened. And not just with this case, but with other famous people who have come in. But like you said, they weren’t all nurses, thankfully. There were lots of people from out other branches/locations just since we are all linked and they could see what was going on. I know (have met a few times) one girl who got fired and she works on the outpatient side and had literally nothing to do with his case and she was fired (“asked to resign immediately”, apparently) right away. She said it was the dumbest thing to do because she got literally nothing from it and didn’t see anything interesting.
Maybe so, but also a blatant violation on the part of 3 nurses who had zero right to be going through the chart. Even if that was before HIPAA, it was still a dumb move.
Maybe so, but also a blatant violation on the part of 3 nurses who had zero right to be going through the chart. Even if that was before HIPAA, it was still a dumb move.
Goes without saying/(slightly insulted). I just like to be clear what we're talking about: A supervisor hoofing it around to various departments to pre-warn people is a self-serving damage-control move on behalf of the institution, not an act of concern for patient privacy. It actually suggests that concern for patient privacy is usually pretty lax.
That's all I'm going to say about it. I'm sure everyone can imagine that there is some folly involved here in believing that people never know that which they don't need to know; there are different/other factors that determine whether someone will choose to make a big deal about it or not.
Jedrnurse, BSN, RN
2,776 Posts
Have pay rates or benefits gotten better because of the shortage, or is there a shortage because of pay rates and benefits?