Enquiring minds want to know

Enquiring minds want to knowFound this disturbing piece in the New York Times:

BILL CLINTON'S identity was hidden behind a false name when he went to New York-Presbyterian Hospital two years ago for heart surgery, but that didn't stop computer hackers, including people working at the hospital, from trying to get a peek at the electronic records of his medical charts.

The same hospital thwarted 1,500 unauthorized attempts by its own employees to look at the patient records of a famous local athlete, said J. David Liss, a vice president at NewYork-Presbyterian.

The usual approach has been to allow types of personnel who need to see the records to have access and log the results. But logging means nothing without consequences for improper access. What did Columbia do to discipline those who tried improperly to access celebrity charts?

It may be necessary to have a person monitoring the process in real time and denying access in some situations. This is what happened in the era of paper charts for a patient not in the hospital. For a patient in the hospital the chart sat in a rack and if there was a parade of people coming to peek they would have been stopped.