This:
UCLA Medical Center is taking steps to fire at least 13 employees and has suspended at least six others for snooping in the confidential medical records of pop star Britney Spears during her recent hospitalization in its psychiatric unit, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.
In addition, six physicians face discipline for peeking at her computerized records, the person said.
Questioned about the breaches, officials acknowledged that it was not the first time UCLA had disciplined workers for looking at Spears’ records. Several were caught prying into records after Spears gave birth to her first son, Sean Preston, in September 2005 at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital, officials said. Some were fired.
That is thirteen more people than have been disciplined at the FBI and other collective agencies for their transgressions. If the UCLA Medical Center ran like the Bush administration, some flack would have been dispatched to say that “there had been some mistakes, but they have all been fixed now, so trust us” and that no, you are not allowed to find out what exactly happened.
Walker
Note that the staff were fired but the doctors were not.
It was my understanding that nurses are harder to replace than doctors in this market.
Dennis - SGMM
In accordance with current Passive Voice practice, the flack would say “Mistakes were made.” No actual person made the mistakes and so no one should be held responsible for them.
myiq2xu
LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!
Sorry, it needed to be said.
demimondian
I was initially appalled that the physicians hadn’t been fired, but then I remembered that many physicians are not on the staffs of the hospitals to which they consult. In that case, the hospital can cut off access privileged, but can’t fire the physicians.
Tax Analyst
Yeah, gosh…when IS “Enough” really “Enough”?
Christ, even Avril Lavigne thinks people oughta leave Britney Spears alone…lol…
BTW, now that Lavigne is a ripe-old 23-years old it’s OK to publicly salivate over her. There’s a really fine pictorial spread of her in a recent edition of Maxim magazine (cheesecake, not total nudity).
After all, I can’t spend ALL of my time trying to correct the direction of our nation.
Delia
Good thing UCLA is concerned about Britney’s rights. I remember the university took more of a “mistakes were made” attitude a couple of years ago when the campus cops tasered a student in Powell Library one night.
I’m an alum and sent them an irate email telling them I wasn’t going to buy any sweatshirts from the Student Store or send them any donations because of the incident. Funny I never heard back.
RSA
Just another example of the inefficiency of government in general, and how we could do much better if it were run more like a
corporationuniversity. (Oh, wait, that’s a completely stupid idea. . .)jake
Only because the staff didn’t claim peeking at her records was a vital step in The War Against Terror. Things are so confused down 1600 Penn. Ave. way, Bush would have issued pardons and Medals of Freedumb.
Roket
These people are in the medical profession and therefore knew better. If these people were not the attending physician, nurse all the way down to janitor, then they had no business prying into private medical records. No matter who the hell it was. They were looking for their 15 minutes of fame and it backfired. Those facing dismissal and/or disciplinary action will be lucky if the DA doesn’t also investigate to see if they violated Patient Privacy laws.
scrutinizer
Miss the point much?
scrutinizer
Me too, Demi—but it would be interesting to know whether the physicians who are getting their hands slapped are physicians who only have hospital privileges, or whether they are staff physicians, or whether they are employees of a medical staffing firm that contracts with the horse pistol.
Just guessing, but I’ll bet it’s some of all. UCLAMC is a teaching hospital, so it would have residents and interns on staff.
Anyway, it’s nice to know that someone was looking out for Britney’s privacy. All the rest of us are probably being data-mined as we, um, type.
myiq2xu
My question is:
Were there nekkid pitchers in the files, and if so, when may we expect them to be published?
4jkb4ia
ILLINOIS BEAT PURDUE! This is yet another sign of the apocalypse.
Congratulations to West Virginia who are certainly in.
4jkb4ia
If I had actually bothered to take the Post I would have known this this morning…
Dennis - SGMM
Oh yeah, mock the FBI. Mock their misidentification of the culprit in the the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, their failure to catch the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks, their inability to pull together the evidence – that they’d already gathered before 9/11 – of a conspiracy to crash airliners, yes mock them for arresting a truck driver for planning to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. Mock them for illegally obtaining the communications records of hundreds of Americans and then attempting to cover their mistakes by obtaining the records of thousands. But remember while you mock that not one of the fifty states, or Britney Spears, has gone Communist on their watch.
Dave_Violence
Folks, folks, folks…
Always go for the easy target, every time. And remember: the laws are what’s written, EXACTLY what’s written, not what doesn’t sound right, not what you feel in your gut, etc.
It was easy to catch ’em spying on Britney, and accordingly…
scrutinizer
Still yet another sign of the Apocraplypse: the 2008 F1 season starts in 2 hours and 11 minutes, there is no Ferrari on the front row, and instead of relying on electronic driver’s aids, the drivers will actually, you know, have to drive the cars themselves.
Krista
OT, but where we’re in the ballpark of hospitals and healthcare, I just want to say to everybody that if you have not seen “Away From Her”, please do so at your earliest opportunity. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Back to your regularly scheduled political stuff.
Cassidy
Yes, it’s against the law. HIPAA is pretty tight. I can’t even look at my own wife’s records, even though I work in the hospital she goes too, unless I’m directly providing care.
Reverend Spooner
Britney Spears is more important than the rest of us, so her privacy is more important, too. It’s as simple as that.
demimondian
Exactly, Rev Spoo. And it’s because her privacy is so important that paparazzi try to take pictures of the portions of her which are her privacy, so that we in the hoi polloi can experience that kind of special privacy vicariously.
It’s true! They’re not trying to get a picture of her so much as they’re trying capture her privacy parts on film.
Martin
This is a teaching hospital. The physicians are attached to UCLA but they are faculty and tenured. Some may still be fired, but it’s a vastly different process and is quite lengthy.
I’ll speak from some experience that academic and health care cultures do not mix well. The things the academic world protects against are the wrong things to protect in the health care world and vice versa. Shit like this happens way too much.
Martin
Ferrari sucks. It’s one letter from Ferraro and she’s vile, therefore Ferrari is. Lewis is on pole and he’s like Jesus, so what could go wrong?
But I love real driving. Nice to see who has the talent and who didn’t.
jake
Works a lot better than expecting would-be doctors to pick things up on their own.
Dennis - SGMM
I was an F1 and GT fan from the late Fifties through the late Seventies. My interest peaked in the the mid-Sixties – talk about having to drive the car. Damn.
Martin
In the last few years the cars got so good with traction control and whatnot that the drivers nearly couldn’t lose traction even if they wanted. Just jump on the gas and throw it into the corner. Automatic gearboxes pretty much took care of shifting. With so little room for error, not much passing either so I have to say, it was fairly dull.
They’ve been working to slow the cars down, screw up the aero stuff and yank out the really cool technology to make things more interesting. They need to work out an event that would let the cars operate at the maximum potential – it’d be something to see.
Dennis - SGMM
Ha! I remember being all excited when the D Jags showed up at Le Mans in 1957 with disc brakes. That’s how old I am. Speaking of aero stuff, I was at the Riverside Can-Am in 1972 when Jim Hall showed up with his Chapparals. They had spoilers like everyone else but the angle changed dynamically according to the throttle/brake. Set everyone on their arses. The sound of metal bashing was heard far into the night that year. Good times.
demimondian
It’s an interesting problem. Car makers always depended on racing to provide a venue for “cool technology”. Problem is, a lot of the technology which is coming in the next few generations of automobiles is stuff which is exceedingly cool — but invisible.
Traction control is the poster child for that — it’s antithetical to racing, but it makes real drivers far safer. Similarly automatic transmissions, which are now so good that they’re more efficient and responsive than the driver can ever be — but which make driving require less skill. As an ordinary driver, that’s great. As a racing fan, not so much.
4jkb4ia
Pitt wins Big East!! 4jkb4ia’s Mom: “They should get higher than a 5 seed”
4jkb4ia
4jkb4ia’s Mom is the Pitt alum.
Keith
Sadly, Huffingtonpost is headlining the article as “Britney Spears Gets Hospital Workers Fired”. On the plus, just about every commenter there has mentioned that it was the workers who got themselves fired.
The Other Steve
When I am declared God Emperor, I shall ban automatic transmissions.
Driving a slush box bores the mind, creates inattentive drivers who do stupid things.
Dennis - SGMM
Well, there is this HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability Accountability Act) thing. The rules about what you can disclose and to whom you can disclose it to are very clear.
The penalties are well defined. HIPAA is a big deal. As a part of my checkered IT career I was tasked with making some medical practices HIPAA-compliant with their patient electronic record keeping so, in this one lone instance, I know whereof I speak.
Oddly enough, HIPAA only applies to those physicians and hospitals who accept payment from third-party health insurance companies. I did IT for some Beverly Hills hair transplantation surgeons who gave a shit less about HIPAA – cash, check, or credit card, baby!
Dennis - SGMM
Traction control is welding up the spiders in your ’55 Ford’s differential.
Martin
Lewis Hamilton is Jesus, I tell you!
How did Ferrari do? 0/6 finishes on their engines.
I think the implications of this are clear. Obama will win in November. I don’t see any other conclusion you could possibly draw.
Tim in SF
…and some wingnut Darrell-knockoff would say here that since there’s no proof of any crime, any discussion of such reveals this blog as a den of extremist libruhls.
scrutinizer
Heh. Watching Kimi Räikkönen flail all over the course was choice. Although, give him credit, he made up some serious time. Course, he kept having to do it, since he kept driving off the road. I’m sorry Jean Todt isn’t the team principal any more; it’s always fun to watch him pout, and this would have been a great day for it. Also a shame that Barrichello got dq’ed; I’d have loved to have seen Ferrari go without any points today.
jonst
The law to keep an eye on in this case is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act 18 U.S.C.1030. That is the law all of the individuals may have violated. And subsection g, of that law, provides for a civil action. IOW….Spears could bring a lawsuit if damages could be found/constructed. And they HAVE been found under similar fact patterns in CFAA cases. HIPAA has no such private right of action. It is, essentially, toothless.
jake
Nope. HIPAA hasn’t yet had a blockbuster case where violators get hit with huge civil money penalties or criminal fines but it isn’t toothless. UCLA is in a funny position because if it emerges that it didn’t have the proper blocks to record access the facility could be in deep doo-doo, and that’s nothing compared to what the staff members might face:
Is this the sort of case the HHS OCR would love to take? You betya. Would it be worth the effort of trying to prove a staff member went into her records looking for something to sell to a tabloid? Yu-huh.
demimondian
Fixed that for you.
Ted
Doesn’t everyone miss Darrell?
Wish he’d come back.
*sniff*
Tim
On a related topic, Ben Stein just had a interesting segment on CBS Sunday Morning about the Spitzer investigation. He argued that the abuse of authority by the IRS led to a fishing expedition against Spitzer and was bound to find some wrongdoing. Soliciting a prostitute is pretty minor in the scheme of things, when you consider the typical corrupt elected official.
So you have a few appointed bureaucrats who overturned the will of the voters. Go set up ongoing wiretaps of every Congressman and Governor and you’re bound to at least some minor indiscretion. Anyway, it’s a pretty good spot for Stein, so check it out.
Krista
As a former resident of a city with very steep hills, I’d strongly advise against that. I love manual transmission, but automatic certainly does have its place. And driving straight up (and by “up”, I mean in the vertical sense) Duke Street in Halifax during rush hour, waiting for the light to change, with the car behind you about 6 inches from your bumper — yeah, that’s the place for an automatic transmission.
jake
Don’t forget the federal judges!
demimondian
No
SATSQ, vol -6
superdestroyer
While consulting at a hospital that would be the emergency room for a NASCAR track, I found out that organizations like NASCAR, NFL etc insist on a lock out system on the computerized medical records. Instead of allowing everyone with the proper user privilege access to someone like Dale Earnhardt Jr electronic medical records, the hospital would have to approve each separate user access.
Image what will happen with the progressive dream of a nationally connected electronic medical record. Anyone could get at anyone else’s medical record.
Obviously UCLA Medical Center is used to the celebrities going other places.
b-psycho
Britney could probably fit an entire sleeper cell up her cooch by now, so maybe the feds are just looking in the wrong place?
Soliton
Said driver six inches from your bumper invariably is someone who has never driven a stick and couldn’t do it if their life depended on it.
Martin
Ah, the “If everyone had bothered to learn how to churn butter, we wouldn’t have this subprime mess” school of conservatism.
I prefer driving a stick but my wife has trouble with her hip and can’t drive long distances any more before the clutch dumps her in pain (LA freeways means never having to drive 100 feet without shifting). We’ve moved to automatic transmission rather than bankrupt the healthcare industry. Not sure what school of liberalism that is, but I accept that I might be the only one in it.
Krista
Exactly. My mom taught me how to drive, and the car in which I learned how to drive had a stick. I may never own a car with a manual transmission again, but it’s still one of those things that I think everybody should know how to do, in case they ever have to drive someone else’s car. Same with parallel parking. A lot of people never properly learned how, and just go out of their way to avoid situations where they have to parallel park. Or city driving. Or any other driving situation that they’re not used to and rarely encounter. I actually seek those situations out, to keep the skill level up.
Zuzu
Which brings me to one of my still-unanswered questions from the great SBVT slime-fest of 2004.
Why was Louis Letson, the MD who claimed to have treated John Kerry in Vietnam, never disciplined for such an outrageous breach of doctor-patient confidentiality? If he actually treated him, that is.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200405070001
And why so few eyebrows raised?