There will be no files in a cake for Huping Zhou, who will be serving jail time for reading the confidential medical files of co-workers and celebrities. Zhou is the first person to be sentenced to prison for violating patient privacy and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Zhou, who was a licensed surgeon in China, was working as a researcher at the UCLA School of Medicine in 2003 when he began accessing medical records of his supervisor and co-workers after being notified that he would be fired for job performance issues.
Over the next three weeks, rather than boosting his performance, he boosted his snooping and started digging into celebrity records. In total, he accessed the patient records system 323 times.
Zhou claimed that he didn't know the snooping was against federal law and pleaded conditionally guilty to the charges, claiming that "an ordinary person" would not have known about the HIPAA privacy act. While HIPAA wasn't as famous in 2003 as it is in 2010, it's hard to believe that Zhou didn't realize there was something wrong in snooping through clearly private information. And 323 times is more than just an "oops".
Many pundits say that this is only the beginning of increased enforcement for HIPAA violations.
In addition to being vigilant, companies of all sizes and all industries need to put in place mechanisms and solutions that will prevent unauthorized people from accessing sensitive data. And of course, the Safe-T Secure Managed File Transfer Solution offers body and attachment encryption so that only your intended recipient can access confidential information that you send by email.
