UCLA worker sentenced to prison for snooping at records
HIPAA Weekly Advisor, May 3, 2010
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United States Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich sentenced a former UCLA Healthcare System employee who admitted snooping at patients records to four months in prison April 27, according to the US Attorney's Office in the Central District of California.
The federal California attorney’s office in a release said Huping Zhou, 47, of Los Angeles, admitted to illegally reading private and confidential medical records, mainly from celebrities and other high-profile patients.
Wistrich condemned Zhou for his lack of respect for patient privacy, according to the release.
The attorney's office says it's the first time a HIPAA privacy violator has been sentenced to prison time.
However, Jeff Drummond, health law partner in the Dallas office of Jackson Walker LLP and author of HIPAA Blog, refutes that contention.
Drummond cited for HIPAA Weekly Advisor the 2004 case of Richard Gibson, a lab assistant in Washington state who was sentenced to 16 months in jail. He was indicted on charges he accessed the medical records of a person with a terminal cancer condition, and ran up credit-card charges of more than $9,000 under the person's name.
Zhou in January of this year pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts of violating the HIPAA Privacy Rule. He is a licensed cardiothoracic surgeon in China who was employed in 2003 at UCLA Healthcare System as a researcher with the UCLA School of Medicine.
According to the US attorney’s release, on the night of October 29, 2003, Zhou accessed and read his immediate supervisor’s medical records and those of other co-workers; he had been dismissed that day from UCLA Healthcare for reasons not related to snooping.
According to court documents, for the next three weeks Zhou accessed the UCLA patient records system 323 times, with most of the accesses involving celebrities.
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