Two employees were fired from an Iowa hospital for allegedly looking through patients' medical records purely for personal interest, reports the Des Moines Register.
Krystal Selby, a patient-orders coordinator at Mahaska County Hospital, was fired for looking at the medical records of her current boyfriend's ex-wife and a volunteer at the hospital. Shiloh Phillips, another Mahaska County patient-orders coordinator, also was fired after looking at files for the mother of her adopted child, her ex-husband, her husband and various emergency room and obstetrics patients.
The patient privacy violations committed at Mahaska County were revealed via complaints to administrators, the hospital's human resources director told the Register.
Similarly, employees at two other Iowa hospitals have been accused of improperly sharing patient information.
A Keokuk Area Hospital employee was fired for allegedly using Facebook to exchange public messages about a patient. And a University of Iowa Hospitals worker was fired for supposedly telling a co-worker--in front of other workers--about a patient who played one of the university's sports teams, revealing the patient's name, the team he played on, when he had blood drawn and his underlying medical condition, according to the Register.
In each case, the accused worker had unregulated access to portions of patients' medical records.
For more:
- read the Des Moines Register article