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Recycled Medical Records Used As Scrap Paper At Elementary School
Parents with students at Hale Elementary School in Minneapolis have found something interesting on the back of their children's pictures hanging on the fridge, detailed medical information. From the article: "Jennifer Kane was tidying her dining room when she found the drawing by her daughter, Keely, who goes to Hale Elementary School. On the back of the paper was the name, birth date and detailed medical information for a 24-year-old St. Paul woman named Paula White. 'The more I read it, the more alarmed I became about the amount of information I had about this person,' said Kane." The security lapse has been blamed on a paralegal donating the paper to the school.
Look in the source code of this comment for detailed medical records!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There's got to be a massive fine coming for this.
The man who dies rich dies disgraced. -- Andrew Carnegie
"Mommy, whats 'anal hemorrhoids'?"
A paralegal donated the paper? Wow. That is like a sys admin posting a server password on a post-it note on the server rack...
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I am sure the school carefully checked over the scrap paper being donated. Some teacher probably got a box full of paper, took a quick look and was just thankful her funding-starved school got some paper. Otherwise, she'd have had to buy some out of her own paycheck like many teachers do...
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Responsibility for processes that ensure this does not happen is with management. If it happens, then not the paralegal, but his/her manager screwed up and needs to be punished. With power comes responsibility. It is time for the to be reflected in the legal system.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Someone should be fired immediately. And was there no one at the school that noticed this?
School teachers are not responsible for HIPAA compliance ;-)
Good going! Would HIPPA be violated, or lawyer client privileged be violated in this case?
Probably both, ouch...
So the people guilty of this law would be the paralegal, Ms. Kane, and possibly the CBS reporter.
No, you're missing the part of HIPAA that spells out who is covered by the regulation. Neither the teacher nor the reporter are bound by HIPAA.
Yeah, but how else are you going to blame this on public employees? You just know it has to be their fault.
But now it's passed to 3rd parties AND 3rd graders!
Three decades ago when I was in high school, they loaded our PDP-8's line printer with the the back sides of boring inventory reports from some manufacturing company.
However, now that we don't manufacturer anything in the USA any more, and our entire economy is becoming nothing more than a mix of healthcare providers and consumers, they *have* to use old health records for printer paper in schools. There's nothing else to use.
Yep. I'm a public university professor, and I regularly have to make copies on the back of once-used paper because we run out of money for paper. I've also been told I need to buy my own printer if I want access to a printer. I'm also being asked to pay for my own inter-library loan articles. Some of our faculty offices have holes in the wall large enough to stick your hand outside and check the weather. (I can't believe I'm not making that one up. But, yep, just looked out window to verify: Prof. Z's office has a fist-sized hole all the way thru the wall; the boards have just rotted away.) Money is getting tight. Unless it's for a new football stadium, which I can see from my window is coming along nicely. (Note to parents: DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN GET A GRADUATE DEGREE IN HISTORY, ENGLISH, GEOGRAPHY, OR ANY OF THE HUMANITIES!)
A) If anyone violated HIPAA, it's the law office, not the school. And whether or not they're in violation of HIPAA specifically depends on how they came upon those records.
B) The paralegal who donated the paper almost certainly will end up losing her job over this. Fortunately for you, we live in a society where people lose their jobs over honest mistakes, since something has to satisfy your misguided rage over something that had no effect on you whatsoever.
C) TFA says this was an afterschool program. I don't know how your school worked, but at my school they didn't have a staff of people to inspect every material used by every afterschool program.
Probably somewhere that has color-less money. Our district gets 'tech funding'. We've bought a few advanced projectors on mobile cats, video cameras, and some other things (no iGear, sadly). But, our teachers get a 'paper allotment' and gott forbid if any other money was spent on paper. The PTA gives teachers a small allocation each year for 'supplementary items' for the classroom. We'd get audited if it was suspected the money was getting used for 'primary education', and that includes buying them new paper. When mentioning at a PTA meeting that maybe the group could act as the go-between to get 'scrap' from local businesses, this issue came up. Who would oversee the appropriateness of the 'scrap'. Which corporate side office would take on the extra work to ensure only approved scrap paper was released, etc. Some government offices would require a 'Distribution A - Approved for Public Release' on any paper that wasn't almost trivially devoid of info.
WAH! I'm stupid! I'm stupid! I'm stupider than you! I'm stupider than you in every way!
Your lyrics lack subtlety. You can't just have your characters announce how they feel! That makes me feel angry!
We've bought a few advanced projectors on mobile cats...
At my school we had mobile projector cats, too. It was hard to keep those little monsters still through an entire lecture, though. Especially when the teacher pulled out the laser pointer.
Health records can contain personally identifying information (like SSN/DOB/address) which can be used for ID theft. (As an ID theft victim, trust me when I say this is *NOT* fun to clean up after.) Also, potentially embarrassing information could be revealed that was trusted to remain between doctor and patient. Working in IT in a medical organization, I can attest to the power HIPAA has over our actions. We need to keep it in mind with everything we do. People get fired for violations like looking up someone's records that they didn't have a job-related need to do. It's not a warning not to do it again with repeat offenders getting the boot. It's strike one and you're out. There will be an investigation and people will be fired.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Oh bother. This is a law firm which deals with private information as a business. It's what they do. Every peon (non-lawyer) should always assume that every document is private, and that disclosure could lose them their jobs. They should be told this, but they should also be able to figure it out on their own.
Now there are scenarios (ex:asking permission) where someone else would be at fault. In the general case, though, the paralegal is squarely at fault. I don't want to hire a lawyer who employs that paralegal... thus one can hardly blame the law firm for not wanting to employ him/her any further.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
As ID theft victim, I can tell you SS number is only icing on cake, not necessary at all. The DOB and address are trivially obtained, and of course credit card companies send "identity theft kits" whereby any misdelivered mail might give a thief a "check" to steal your money. I've also had a person 800 miles away put medical charges on my insurance account, somehow they had obtained insurance card (misdelivered mail again?) and used in conjunction with their own real ID. So then I get bill with their name on it, thousands of dollars of surgery and services were rendered with no questions asked.