Antonia Noori Farzan reports:
MyKayla McCann was shocked by what she discovered at her first day of work.
Using confidential medical records, her new co-workers at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston, Maine, had created an ersatz collage that was hidden on the inside of a cabinet door and labeled it the “Wall of Shame.” The records belonged to the hospital’s physically and mentally disabled patients, and described their “sexual activity, genital dysfunction, bowel movements, bodily odors and other personal maladies,” according to a 2018 report from Maine’s Human Rights Commission, which labeled the collage “objectively offensive.”
Read more on Washington Post.
This is a troubling report on so many levels. I wonder whether HHS is looking into this, as even though the health system claims that no patient was identified, the fact that the employee’s records were accessed may give HHS OCR the opening to pursue a more in-depth investigation of privacy and data security compliance with HIPAA.