SAN FRANCISCO — Sutter Medical Foundation did not violate California’s medical confidentiality act, and expose itself to potentially $4 billion in statutory damages, when a thief stole a computer containing 4 million patients’ medical records, the Third District Court of Appeal ruled Monday.
The state’s medical privacy statute was not triggered because there’s no evidence the thief or anyone else actually looked at the records, Justice George Nicholson wrote for a unanimous panel. “The legislation at issue is the ‘Confidentiality of Medical Information Act,’ not the Possession of Medical Information Act,” he wrote.
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