Is It Ever OK To Look At Someone's Medical Records?

Is it ever ok to look at
someone’s medical records?

Medical
Records
Snooping
• In Dec 2014, University Hospitals of
Cleveland notified almost 700 patients
that their medical records had been
accessed by an IT employee
• A couple of years before that incident,
there was a similar one with a hospital
in the Northwest that led to
terminations of 13 employees
Snooping Medical records | http://LearnHealthTech.com

• In both of these examples, there's a
good chance that the employees
had no intentions of using any of the
information that they had improperly
accessed
• In fact, in this second example,
some of the employees were simply
looking at the charts of their
spouses.
Medical
Records
Snooping

Let’s look at three scenarios
and test your knowledge to see
if any of these situations
constitutes an illegal or
inappropriate access of patient
records.
Medical
Records
Snooping

• Clinical IT Analyst Nancy gets a request
from Dr. Frank that he accidentally
entered the wrong diagnosis code on an
order for an Ultrasound on a female
patient
• Nancy checks the Ultrasound order, and
walks the doctor through correcting the
diagnosis
• Nancy also checks the medication orders
to see if they also have the right
diagnoses
Scenario
One

Then she checks the pregnancy
status of the patient, and checks to
see how many previous
pregnancies the patient had.
Did Nancy do anything wrong?
Scenario
One

Yes! Nancy was right to check
the medication orders to see if
they had the right diagnoses,
since the doctor made an error
on the Ultrasound order.
However, Nancy had no
business checking the pregnancy
status of the patient. That had
nothing to do with the issue at
hand.
Did Nancy do
anything
wrong?

• Tammy is a scheduler at Pike
Primary Care, and her husband
Ralph also has his care at the
same clinic, but with a different
doctor
• Ralph had an appointment a few
days ago, and has been calling the
clinic back to check on some Lab
results
• Tammy knows that Ralph's doctor
is out for a few more days, so…
Scenario
Two

Tammy asks the doctor's
Medical Assistant to check the
Labs and get back with Ralph.
Did Tammy do anything
wrong?
Scenario
Two

No. It was fine to have the MA
check the system for lab
results. If Tammy had checked
the results herself for her
husband, she would have
been in the wrong.
Did Tammy
do anything
wrong?

Bill is an Analyst in the IT department of
Pike Medical Center. His wife Kristen is
also an IT Analyst, but she works for a
different hospital
Scenario Three

Snooping Medical Records | http://LearnHealthTech.com
Kristen wants to see an Endocrinologist
named Dr Wong at Pike Medical Center
where her husband works. She wants to
know that the doctor is conscientious in
documenting in the system, so she asks
Bill to run some reports on how well Dr.
Wong does at correctly documenting things
in the EMR. However…
Scenario Three

No patient data would be in
these reports.
Did Bill do anything wrong?
Scenario Three

Probably so. Even though patient
data was not compromised, Bill
used his advanced position to
provide data that is somewhat
privileged.
Did Bill do
anything
wrong?

The bigger issue here is if an
audit was done, it would raise
suspicions toward Bill,
leaving security staff
wondering what other info Bill
might have accessed. You
don't want to be in that
position.
Did Bill do
anything
wrong?

We should only access the
minimum amount and
breadth of data needed to do
our jobs in Healthcare IT.
The Golden
Rule on looking
at patient data

This complete post is detailed
at LearnHealthTech.com/snooping-
medical-records
Learn more
about
Healthcare IT
Finally…

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Is It Ever OK To Look At Someone's Medical Records?

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Is It Ever OK To Look At Someone's Medical Records?