HIPPA Violation Please Help

beachgirl1987 · Mar 19, 2008

A good friend of mine in my clinical group commited a HIPPA violation yesterday completely unknowingly and by mistake. It is under investigation and she is extremely worried that she is going to be kicked out of the program and just doesnt know what is going to happen, Can I please get some advice from you guys about what yhou think is going to happen?

The day before she was taking care of a patient that was very sick and she was very concerned about. My friend was also sick and proabably not going to clinical the next day but when she was leaving the instructor said "I really hope you come tomorrow because I want to know how your patient is". Well my friend went to clinical the next day and when she went by her patients room she noticed she wasnt in the room anymore. So she went to the computer and typed in her patients name and when it came up she clicked on it and started looking at her patients chart to see what was going on. She then noticed that she had been moved to a different floor but didnt think twice about it. However we are only on one floor and can only take care of patients on this one floor so she knew she wouldnt be taking care of her again.

Well when the instructor got there she told her everything that was going on with her patient and that she had been moved to a different floor.

The instructor listened to everything then when she was finished asked her to step outside and stated "I know you didnt know but that was a HIPPA violation" My friend was like what are you talking about. And the instructor began to tell her that since the patient had been moved to a different floor that she was not allowed to look at her chart. And that she would have to file a report and could be kicked out...but hopefully not because she could explain that being a student we are still learning.

However my friend is scared to death. SHe talked with other students including myself and we all had no idea that that was a violation we figured we had the patient for both days so we had access to the chart for both days.

What do you guys think? Do you think she will be kicked out of school? We are first year LPN students. And we all had no idea that this was considered a violation!

THANK YOU all for reading this!