On June 21, 2011, a federal grand jury indicted Richard A. Kaye, D.O., of Suffolk, Virginia, for the wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information under the criminal provisions of HIPAA.

Kaye was the Medical Director of the Psychiatric Care Center at Sentara Obici Hospital. The indictment alleges that he had treated a mental health client at the center from August 20, 2007, to September 4, 2007. The discharge summary noted that the patient was not a danger to others. Nonetheless, Kaye disclosed the client’s individually identifiable health information to the client’s employer on three occasions under the excuse that the patient was a serious and imminent threat to the safety of the public when he knew that the patient was not such a threat and had so stated in the discharge summary.

Although the Privacy Rule has an authorized disclosure without patient consent, authorization, or opportunity to object when the disclosure is necessary to avert a serious and imminent threat to the health or safety of a named individual or the public, the disclosure certainly requires that the threat be real, not a pretext!

I was talking to a health care attorney yesterday who told me that the hospital that she represents recently had to fire a doctor who had posted derogatory comments about patients on social media.

With the doctor from UCLA Health Systems that was sent to federal prison for accessing Leonardo DiCaprio’s and Barbara Walter’s charts and the doctor in Arkansas that received probation for accessing a dead celebrity murder victim’s chart, both out of curiosity, along with above two situations, clinicians must begin to realize that their status as an M.D. or D.O or other credential will not protect them from the consequences of committing a HIPAA violation.