CABINET AT AUCTION CONTAINED PATIENTS’ CONFIDENTIAL DATA
0 Comments | Palm Beach Post, Apr 28, 2007 | by PHIL GALEWITZ Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Ray Collins was shopping for furniture at Palm Beach County’s monthly surplus sale when he came across a metal file cabinet with a sticker that read “Communicable Disease Reports.”
When he pulled out the bottom drawer he was startled to find a 2- inch thick file filled with confidential test results of patients who tested positive for various diseases.
The cabinet, which had been property of the county health department, was being sold for $10 at the public auction on Belvedere Road.
Collins knows about communicable diseases and the laws that require medical records to be kept confidential: He’s the administrator of the Martin County Health Department.
Collins quickly called Dr. Jean Malecki, his peer and director of the Palm Beach County Health Department.
Within a half-hour that Saturday morning in December, she had sent an employee to pick up the records.
“We were fortunate, absolutely,” Malecki said in an interview last week.
The reports were sent by doctors and clinical laboratories to the county.
They were kept in a filing cabinet, rather than a more secure area, because they did not include the 50 communicable diseases the department has to collect.
Reportable diseases include the mumps, hepatitis and AIDS.
State and federal laws require doctors and public health officials to closely guard patients’ medical records to maintain privacy.
The health department’s goof comes less than two years after a worker accidentally sent a confidential list of names of people with HIV to more than 800 department employees via an e-mail.
Collins’ discovery at the auction led to an investigation by the state Health Department Office of Inspector General, which verified that the records were left unsecured in the donated file cabinet for about 90 minutes.
The cabinet that included the reports had been used by an employee who was fired for failing to take directions and follow procedures, the inspector general’s report said.
The health department decided not to alert the patients of the potential breach of their confidential information because it believes only Collins saw it, Malecki said.
~ phil_galewitz@pbpost.com