Brian Bowling reports:
The Pittsburgh Veterans Affairs Healthcare System is trying to use a technical violation of its leave policy to punish an employee who reported a violation of the federal health record privacy law, a union official said.
“That’s about it in a nutshell,” said Keith Watson, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 2028.
Air Force veteran Karen Santoro, 44, worked in the University Drive Division’s Surgical Services until August when she discovered the violation. She started working for the Pittsburgh VA in 2007.
[…]
It was a shock when she overheard a conversation last summer that made her suspect her co-workers had peeked at her medical records, Santoro said. The VA’s information security officer verified that three of her colleagues had accessed her record, and a subsequent investigation by the hospital’s privacy officer in August determined two of them had no legitimate reason to look at it, she said.
Read more in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. It’s not clear to me whether this incident was included in the VA’s monthly reporting to Congress.