Home Health & Hospice Week

• Just when you thought you could rest on your HIPAA laurels, a new case indicates that investigators are taking patient privacy violations more seriously than ever.

A hospital employee in California recently was sentenced to four months in prison for reading medical files that did not pertain to his line of work. The employee, a hospital researcher at the UCLA School of Medicine, accessed patient records at the hospital over 300 times during a three-week period, mostly to peek at the private health records of celebrities, according to a DOJ release.

In his plea agreement, the employee "acknowledged that at the time he viewed these patients' medical information, he had no legitimate  eason, medical or otherwise, for obtaining the personal information," the DOJ says. The DOJ investigators did not find any evidence that the employee attempted to use or sell the information that he accessed -- he apparently sought the information out of curiosity.