Kathryn Knott Case

I could go for some tacos, if they don't make you cry, they're not spicy enough.

Extra sauce!

closest one is over 200 miles away...

Which basically just confirms my prediction earlier in this thread - she did not violate HIPAA, and was ultimately fired by the hospital to save face.

In case no-one caught it, the x-ray shown on her twitter account was posted over a year ago. No complaints were made in all this time, but now that she is the focal point of a scandal, it has tarnished the image of her employer.

And under HIPAA, the onus is on the hospital to make sure that Protected Health Information is only available to employees who need access to it to perform their duties. If another hospital worker is able to go "snooping" as you suggested, either they have access to the information anyway, or the hospital is not adhering to HIPAA.

In either case, the original twitter image contained no Protected Health Information, and is not in violation of HIPAA in and of itself. If another employee with access to PHI were able to identify the patient based on the image, that would still not violate HIPAA. If that other employee were to make the identity of that patient known to people who do not have access, that would violate HIPAA.

They fired her wayyyyyyy to quickly... the hospital would have been better off if they made some kind of statement like "Ms. so and so's employment is under review while the investigation into this matter is ongoing."

If they come to find out that she wasn't as involved as people made her out to be then it's going to be an issue for them. Because as the title suggests people probably thought she was stomping on these people herself and that it was a hate crime. Now it's potentially that she was just there and watched it happen but helped to attempt to cover it up and now people are slightly backpedalling but still calling for he r to be crucified. What if they paint her as someone who was in shock as to what happened before her and afraid to go against the two men she just witnessed pummeling the other couple?

I'm not saying she's innocent, in fact, she might have russled up the whole situation and goaded thsoe guys into the fight but the fact remains that the media has done a spot on job of early reporting with a lack of evidence and people have drawn their own conclusions. You could even argue that with the X-ray... she could have been commenting on it and could have come from somewhere else. No one at this time knows where the x-ray came from and just assumed that she took it from the hospital. What if it came from somewhere else?

You guys just want to demonize someone right out of the gate and you don't even know whether or not you actually should lol...

Edit: Also, the two matters are completely independent from one another.

No, but the point I'm trying to make is that she did not break any laws by posting that image. At best, she violated the hospital's social media policy by posting information related to her place of employment on her personal twitter account. Is that grounds for termination? Possibly.

But as I said, that image has been on her twitter account for over a year. The hospital's decision to axe her so quickly after Ms. Knott made the news recently, seems to be more about the hospital trying to preserve its good name rather than policy enforcement.

That's what "random" drug and alcohol screening is for.

If she's not showing up for work drunk and there have been no complaints, what she does on her own time is her business. I think she reminds you of a girl who wouldn't go to prom with you or something, where is this hatred coming from?

Well, I never said she was a good employee...

But as for HIPAA, as I said, it is only a violation if the patient is identifiable to people/employees who do not otherwise have access to that patients' PHI. Maybe the hospital did isolate a reference on her twitter feed that was enough to challenge the boundaries of HIPAA, but there is no clear violation.

Identifiable information means information which identifies the patient. A woman with hemorrhoids is NOT identifiable information, there are millions of middle aged women with hemorrhoids.

You fail to grasp the most basic portion of HIPAA... IDENTIFIABLE

It's akin to citing traffic regulations as proof someone broke the law without being able to wrap your head around the fact that they weren't driving a car.

If you want to shout condemnations from the moral highground, it would be advisable to be standing on solid ground in the first place.

Not quite. The key detail in determining a HIPAA violation is whether or not the information is personally identifiable.

This is a violation, but the scenario it assumes is that a healthcare worker is letting a family member or co-worker into a secure area, and that person accesses medical records directly, which of course, will contain PHI and personally identifiable information.

This refers to sharing PHI between medical providers. For example, a patient at one medical clinic chooses to transfer to another clinic. The new clinic submits a request to the original clinic for the patients' medical records. The original clinic then needs to fax the medical records to the new clinic - but accidentally faxes to the wrong number. This is what this violation is referring to.

This is assuming there is personally identifiable information included. That is not the case here.

Again, this assumes personally identifiable information. It is ok for a medical employee to tell their spouse about the horrible guy with hemorrhoids they encountered that day, but it is not ok for the employee to tell their spouse about the horrible guy named John Smith with hemorrhoids they encountered that day.

This is where hospital policies come into play to ensure HIPAA is followed. This is the only potential violation Ms. Knott has made - while she didn't name the patients in her twitter posts, there may be enough information for an employee who doesn't have access to PHI to put two and two together. But that's a grey area.

Again, this assumes personally identifiable information is present.

Didn't Kaplan, the director of a hospital ethics board, in the article just clarify how she is subject to HIPAA?

Like I said earlier, what's with this witch hunt on unsolid ground?

Again, they would have to prove that anyone who could put two and two together is subscribed to her twitter feed and then was a witness to the situation in which they had enough information to put two and two together.

You'll notice Mr. Kaplan is not speaking in absolutes rather he uses terminology like I think and if there's enough information.

You guys want this chick to suffer so much when she hasn't even been found guilty of anything yet. She wouldn't have been dealing with patients any time soon so just let the investigation go on and make your decision when all the information is at your disposal instead of calling for the crucification 5 seconds in.

No, that's just not how it works.

1. There is no expectation of privacy in public, this extends to any public area of the hospital, like a hallway.

2. See a person isn't identifying them, only if you have their name or anything else that personally identifies them (example: unique title like mayor) does it constitute identifiable information.

You could make the argument that everyone needs to have a blindfold on in a hospital by logical progression. If you saw a woman being brought into the maternity ward, you could surmise that she is pregnant, ZOMG HIPAA VIOLATION!!1

You're reaching to say the least.