23 Employees: Farrah Fawcett and Patient Privacy, Part 2

California health regulators fined Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower hospital $250,000 Thursday for failing to keep 23 employees from snooping in the medical records of Nadya Suleman, the mother who set off a media frenzy after giving birth to octuplets in January.

The fine is the first monetary penalty imposed and largest allowed under a new state law enacted last year after widely publicized violations of privacy at UCLA Medical Center involving Farrah Fawcett, Britney Spears, California First Lady Maria Shriver and other celebrities.

The breaches involving Farrah's medical records -- first reported by The Los Angeles Times in April 2008 -- enraged California lawmakers and prompted the new law. In Farrah's case, a low-level UCLA employee accessed her records more often than her own doctors. The employee pleaded guilty last year to federal felony charges of selling the information to the National Enquirer.

Farrah said recently that she had suspected that hospital staff were leaking her records. To test that, she delayed telling her family about a specific recent diagnosis – until after it was leaked to the press – proof that an employee had been snooping.

Advice to people concerned about privacy: Ask your doctor to sign this form by the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation.

Read last year's story about Farrah.

Thanks to Charles Ornstein for the source story in the May 15 issue of the Los Angeles Times.

The inauguration of Pres. Obama: A new era of responsibility - aleinu

In his inaugural speech, the President called on us to "begin again the work of remaking America." He later commented,

"What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task."

I've been giving my all to this difficult task, as have many readers. Now, in our healthcare and patient safety realm, there is both an encouraging early sign and a special sense of urgency.

Encouragingly, in the economic stimulus package, the version being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives includes $20 billion for health information technology. The President has called for making electronic medical records widely available to make our healthcare safer and less expensive.

Sen. Teddy Kennedy experienced a seizure during his lunch with Pres. Obama. Kennedy is terminally ill with brain cancer, and he has focused the rest of his life on achieving national health insurance. This underlines our sense of urgency: the time is now. As Rabbi Hillel said, "If not now, when?"

Indeed, many Jewish services end with the song Aleinu ("it is our duty," or literally, "it’s on us"). We can make that our personal closing benediction to the inauguration of our Community Organizer in Chief.

Advice: Host a house meeting on health care reform, and summarize the story for www.change.gov

Read another story from a speech by Barack Obama.