Judge Orders Former Kaiser Permanente Employee To Stop Posting Patient Data Online
Superior Court Judge James Richman on Wednesday ordered a former employee of Oakland-based Kaiser Permanente to stop posting links to private patient information on her blog, the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Lee, San Francisco Chronicle, 3/24).
Kaiser Permanente last week alerted 140 patients in Northern California that a former employee posted private information about them. The information includes medical record numbers, patient names and information about some routine lab tests, but not the test results (California Healthline, 3/18).
Richman issued a preliminary injunction against former Kaiser employee Elisa Cooper and told her that the information she was posting is private, stating, "I would ask you, put yourself in the position of one of those patients -- that ought to be enough."
Cooper defended her action by saying, "the only patient information in my possession I found on a public Web site on the Internet" (Lee, San Francisco Chronicle, 3/24).