A federal appeals court has refused to toss out charges that a former researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles Health System illegally obtained medical records of patients, including celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Hanks.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on May 10 rejected arguments by Huping Zhou that the charges brought against him under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA) should have been dismissed because he didn’t know what he was doing was illegal. The court said that he didn’t need to know his actions were illegal to be in violation of the law.
“Under Zhou’s interpretation of the statute, a defendant is guilty only if he knew that obtaining the personal healthcare information was illegal,” Judge Milan Smith wrote. “We reject Zhou’s argument because it contradicts the plain language of HIPAA.”
Zhou’s attorney, Amy Fan of Saint Martin & Fan in Los Angeles, said her client had not decided whether to petition for an en banc hearing. She called the statute “convoluted,” “complicated” and old fashioned, based in a time when medical records were physically passed from person to person at a hospital. With everything electronic, people need to know what is legal and illegal, she said.
“Nowadays, it’s on tablets, it’s on computers, it’s recorded it’s no longer physical,” she said. “I don’t think this opinion is going to be the end of it. It takes time and changes and different fact patterns to maybe make Congress or someone realize that there’s got to be some language change.”
Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, issued a statement: “We’re pleased with the ruling. The patient confidentiality rules in HIPAA are well known to medical professionals, and Mr. Zhou chose to violate a law designed to protect all patients.”
Zhou was a research assistant in rheumatology at UCLA Health System for less than 10 months in 2003. The system operates the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center; Santa Monica, Calif.-based UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital; Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital at UCLA; Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA; and UCLA Medical Group.
Federal prosecutors charged Zhou in 2008 with accessing medical records four times starting on Nov. 17, 2003 three days after he was fired and ending on Nov. 19, 2003. According to Fan, his electronic access to medical records wasn’t canceled when he was fired.
In 2009, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew Wistrich denied Zhou’s motion to dismiss. Zhou pleaded guilty to four misdemeanor counts on Jan. 8, 2010, and was sentenced to four months in federal prison, followed by a year of supervised release, and was ordered to pay a $2,000 fine. Zhou was the first person sentenced to jail on a misdemeanor charge under HIPAA.
Zhou’s plea deal, however, was conditional and reserved his right to appeal the denial of his motion to dismiss.
In July, UCLA agreed to pay $865,500 to settle an investigation brought by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights into security and privacy violations between 2005 and 2008. Other hospital employees have been fired for accessing medical records of celebrities, including Britney Spears and the late Farrah Fawcett.
Contact Amanda Bronstad at [email protected].
