The combustible combination of a cell phone camera and MySpace account confronts us once again this morning with evidence that the human capacity for depravity knows no bounds. In this example, we have two emergency room workers fired from the University of New Mexico Hospital for posting pictures of injured patients to the Internet.
From the Associated Press:
Director of Public Affairs Sam Giammo said Sunday the photos - mainly close-ups of injuries being treated in the Albuquerque hospital's emergency room over the past few months - were posted on an employee's private MySpace page.
UNMH values patient privacy "very, very highly and we will do everything we can to protect them," Giammo said. "We just won't tolerate unprofessional actions by any of our staff. We just won't stand for that."
Who would you have thought that the hospital -- or any hospital -- needed to make explicit in a memo or training program or something that snapping pics of patient injuries and posting them to the Internet is prohibited? (Not that there's any humor here, but the story does remind of the Seinfeld episode where George, having just heard that he was fired, quizzed his now ex-boss about company policy relative to having sex on his desk with a member of the cleaning crew: "Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? I tell you, I gotta plead ignorance on this thing, because if anyone had said anything to me at all when I first started here that that sort of thing is frowned upon ... you know, cause I've worked in a lot of offices, and I tell you, people do that all the time."
Let's hope such is not the case with shutterbugs in emergency rooms.
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Who would you have thought
The folks that wrote the HIPAA regulations thought that - they require privacy and security training for all employees (I believe that it's an annual requirement, actually). So there's no way these people couldn't have known that this would be a problem.
HIPAA
That's exactly why HIPAA was signed into law. There will always be nitwits that, for a variety of reasons pull stunts like this. HIPAA is a great tool for prosecuting those that violate patient confidentially and privacy. I say don't just fire them, prosecute them.
HIPAA prosecutions would be a change
One of the biggest disappointments of HIPAA is that despite the existence of the law, the literally billions of dollars spent by government and private organizations to attempt to comply, and numerous complaints filed with the agency responsible for enforcement (the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, aka CMS), there has been virtually no prosecution to date for violations. A law which is not enforced is not a law.
Professionalism? UNM Hospital? What a joke.
I find it ironic that their spokesman cites a violation of "professionalism" of these employees and how "We just won't tolerate unprofessional actions by any of our staff. We just won't stand for that."
If that were the case then a good chunk of physician faculty members would have been removed from that teaching hospital a long time ago. Anyone who has worked there knows what I mean.
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