Home Health & Hospice Week
Are Whistleblowers Violating HIPAA Privacy Regulations? One Health Care Provider Tries To Make The Case
If your organization is facing a whis-tleblower lawsuit for violating the False Claims Act, can you accuse the whistleblower employees of violating HIPAA regulations in the course of making their case against you? One health care provider thinks so.
Mount Sinai Hospital employees Joseph Gaston and Xiomary Ortiz filed a whistleblower action against the New York City hospital, alleging Medicaid fraud, according to an analysis by Indianapolis-based attorney Norman Tabler Jr. of law firm Faegre Baker Daniels.
Gaston and Ortiz accused Mount Sinai of “doctor swapping” (one doctor provided services but the hospital billed the services under another doctor’s name), upcoding, billing for services never provided, and billing multiple times for a single service item.
Mount Sinai not only denied the whistleblowers’ allegations, but also filed a motion against Gaston and Ortiz claiming that they violated patients’ privacy protections under HIPAA by exploiting confidential patient information to make the whistleblower case against the hospital.
In other words, Mount Sinai’s position is not that Gaston and Ortiz “exploited inside information about the hospital; it’s that they violated the privacy of patients by accessing their confidential medical records to make their whistleblower case,” Tabler explained.
Home Health & Hospice Week
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Are Whistleblowers Violating HIPAA Privacy Regulations? One Health Care Provider Tries To Make The Case
If your organization is facing a whis-tleblower lawsuit for violating the False Claims Act, can [...]
