Confidentiality: Court Discounts HIPAA Violation As Employer’s Pretext For Age Discrimination.

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Confidentiality: Court Discounts HIPAA Violation As Employer’s Pretext For Age Discrimination.

Legal Eagle Eye Newsletter for the Nursing Profession

A healthcare facility employee accessing a coworker’s medical chart usually is a HIPAA violation for which the guilty employee can be terminated. However, this nurse was the employee health nurse whose job could involve looking at coworkers’ medical charts when necessary. Management never gave the nurse the chance to tell her side of the story. UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT CALIFORNIA June 9, 2016

A sixty-nine year-old nurse was fired from her position as the hospital’s employee health nurse for allegedly violating the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) by accessing a coworker’s confidential medical records. Her coworker was concerned that he actually had TB or was infectious even though the annual skin test administered by the nurse was negative. He twice had his personal physician give him a QuantiFERON-TB Gold Test and asked that the results be sent to the employee health nurse. The nurse reviewed the test results the employee had asked to be sent to her, tried to educate herself about false-positives in the new test, talked with the state Department of Health and accessed her coworker’s medical chart.

A supervisor at the hospital quickly terminated the nurse for an alleged HIPAA violation after speaking with the hospital’s business manager and interviewing the tested employee but never speaking with the nurse herself. The US District Court for the Eastern District of California ruled the nurse successfully exposed the hospital’s alleged rationale for her termination as a pretext for age discrimination. The Court did not believe a HIPAA violation occurred. The nurse’s position as employee health nurse involved a legitimate need to delve into her coworkers’ medical statuses and health histories when necessary to do her job. Her supervisor rushed quickly to judgment without giving the nurse a chance to explain what happened. Ramsey v. Siskiyou, 2016 WL 3197557 (E.D. Cal., June 9, 2016).