Byars v. UAB Hosp. Mgmt., LLC – Sept. 2015 (Summary)

HIPAA VIOLATIONS/DISCRIMINATION

Byars v. UAB Hosp. Mgmt., LLC, Civil Action No. 2:14-CV-1338-WMA (N.D. Ala. Sept. 25, 2015)

The District Court for the Southern Division of the Northern District of Alabama granted a hospital management organization’s motion for summary judgment with regard to a white nurse’s Title VII claims of racial discrimination. The court held the plaintiff nurse could not establish she was treated differently from similarly situated employees because, although two African-American nurses at the hospital were not fired for violations of the hospital management organization’s HIPAA policy, the plaintiff nurse’s alleged HIPAA violations were “qualitatively and quantitatively” different. While the other nurses’ HIPAA violations were single offenses where the nurses accessed limited information, the plaintiff nurse had numerous HIPAA violations, including accessing her own medical records, accessing her daughter’s medical records, and accessing the medical records of other employees. Additionally, the plaintiff nurse had accessed the full medical records of two participants in a research study without the requisite pre-screening checklist form, in violation of the HIPAA policy approved IRB protocol.

The court also held the plaintiff nurse failed to show her termination was pretextual because the nurse stated in her EEOC complaint she was terminated because of a “HIPAA violation; which [she] admitted”; she admitted that accessing her own medical records, her daughter’s medical records, and the medical records of a coworker were all in violation of the hospital management organization’s HIPAA policy; and she failed to refute the report of the security and privacy coordinator who concluded the plaintiff nurse had violated the HIPAA policy and presented a “high risk of harm” to the patients whose information she had accessed. The court noted that a letter from the Alabama board of nursing stating her conduct “did not constitute a provable violation of the Nurse Practice Act” was of diminished probative value because neither the plaintiff nurse nor the letter included any information of how the Nurse Practice Act was analogous to the HIPAA policy of the hospital management organization.