Binghui Huang reports on a lawsuit arising from alleged patient record snooping. But this case seems to have another element to it: what did the health system do after it learned — and confirmed — that patient record snooping had occurred?
A man who spent a couple months in Lehigh Valley Hospital claims in a lawsuit that a doctor who wasn’t treating him and with whom he had a contentious business relationship illegally tapped into his medical records a dozen times, a claim Lehigh Valley Health Network and the state Health Department acknowledged in letters to the patient.
The case apparently led the Health Department recently to cite Lehigh Valley Health Network for not protecting confidential patient information. In June, the department posted a report from a May 6 inspection that concluded LVHN hadn’t made changes to safeguard patient data despite the network’s own finding that a physician in 2017 had perused medical information for months on a patient that doctor wasn’t treating.
Read more on The Morning Call.
Update: There’s an interesting commentary on the case and issues by HIPAA attorney Jeff Drummond. You can read it on Jeff’s blog.