Would you be as upset if she was ranting about some unidentifiable person with diabetes, or hypertension, or is it specifically the topic of abortions that makes you uneasy?
It’s not a HIPAA violation as I understand the law. It may violate some company confidentiality policy, however.
What did she post that could POSSIBLY be used to identify this client?
#2, via Facebook message, “Hey, you could get in trouble talking about work clients on Facebook. You should probably delete those posts.”
Plus this woman has been recently seeing someone about social security disabilty issues. Only five degrees of separation and all that.
I’d keep my nose out of this if I were you.
Anyone who could id her by knowing that stuff would have already known it though. Otherwise, how would that info alone be enough?
If you really care about her, contact her and tell her that you’ve heard about employers snooping around on Facebook. Maybe her current employer wouldn’t do this, but prospective ones might.
If you don’t really care all that much, I wouldn’t get too worked up about it.
I’m sorry, but anyone who can’t see what is wrong with what occurred here has some serious misunderstandings about the healthcare profession.
Individuals who work at healthcare clinics aren’t absolved of all responsibility so long as they don’t violate HIPAA. It’s incredibly short sighted to believe that HIPAA or confidentiality obligations are the only issues here.
Well, they might know about the number of kids and miscarriages but not the abortions. However the real problem is that having identified her they read the comments and get upset enough on her behalf to inform her employers or they tell her about it or they are not her friend and pass it around for fun so it gets back to the client eventually anyway.
This seems like quite a stretch. How is simply hearing about “a woman with 3 kids” enough to tip someone off, Ahh-haa!, it must be Mary! ?
It’s not a breach of confidentiality, but it also doesn’t seem like a good habit for her to get into so she should probably be advised to not do it again. It’d be fine as an interesting anecdte to share at a family barbecue, but not on so public a forum as Facebook. Or the SDMB, come to think of it.
Telling people that they have misunderstandings and are short sighted isn’t terribly helpful unless you follow up by giving the correct information and telling them what other issues they have overlooked.
It wasn’t just “a woman with three kids” it was how many kids she had, how many abortians she had and how many miscarriages she had. She posted that to all of her friends. The OP mentioned that quite a number of people commented on it. All of those people’s friends could also see it. Quite literally, thousands of people may have seen this post. If this person mentioned that they were at that office to a few friends and one of those friends happened to be to see something on facebook that said “John likes Sallys comment “I totally agree with that…disgusting” and clicks on it to see the OP’s cousin’s status” (Convoluted as it all sounds) it may get back to her.
Laws may not be broken, internal policies may or may not have been breached (because they haven’t been written about something like this yet, possibly), but I’d say it’s something that still shouldn’t be done.
As for what should be done. I’m not sure. I’d stay away from PMing her. The problem with that is that if someone else does report it to the company, she’s going to assume it’s you. Just like if you ask your neighbors to be quiet at night and then someone calls the cops, they’re going to assume it was you that called the cops.
My original plan was to take a screen shot and email it to the company to let them know. Seems people think that’s the asshole route, but, IMO, she shouldn’t be putting that out on social media to begin with.
How about meeting in the middle. Set up an anonymous email address and email her that way with it. You can tell her she shouldn’t be doing it and she’ll never know it was you.
Something my dad taught me years ago is that you always need to pay attention to what you say because you never know who’s listening. It’s something I forget all that time. I have a bad habit of saying stupid crap and finding out, for example, the person I’m talking about just happens to be standing right behind me. To make a case more similar to the to the one in the OP. A few years ago, I was talking to a ‘random guy’. He asked who did some tile work at my store. I told him the name and he said he wasn’t familiar with him. I went on to say that it’s probably for the best. The guy is a lazy drunk, he does good work, but he’s usually falling off his bar stool at 8am, he’s hard to get a hold of, he gets half way through the project and then stops showing up etc etc etc and then the guy said “just kidding, he’s my brother in law” :smack:. Well, I felt like an asshole. At least he agreed with me about it.
#1. Stay completely out of it. Someone probably should say something to her (although I don’t feel she violated confidentiality) but it’s not your job to do it and it’ll only backfire on you.
JoeyP, how many people saw that post depends entirely on the privacy settings on that account. If, like most people, she has her posts set to ‘Friends Only’, none of her friend’s friends could have seen it.
If she’s making Public or Friends-of-Friends posts, and including rants/details about work clients… well that’s just so stupid that I almost hope she does see some repercussions from it at work. But not by being reported by the OP, because that would be fucked up.
It’s entirely possible enough info was posted such that someone could identify her raising HIPAA issues. But, I fired my best assistant for posting similar stuff to her Facebook. It was ‘friends only’ but she had like 400 and half the office was on that list. It is a PR nightmare and simply inappropriate.
PM her and suggest she remove such things, but leave out anything political as previously mentioned.
Emailing the company with a screenshot would be an amazing dick move. The anonymous email thing is harmless but ridiculous. I am still trying to figure out how it could possibly be construed as your boyfriend’s cousin’s business if you might possibly be doing something your boss wouldn’t like. Do you tattle if your aunt’s best friend’s husband steals paperclips from work too?
I’m not totally sure I understand why sending an email to the company is assholish of fucked up.
Pretend like you’re the person the OP’s cousin was talking about. Pretend like someone took a screen shot of their friend’s facebook page that said “OMG this lady just had her 5th abortion, plus she’s had 3 miscarriages AND she already has a 2 kids. jeez lady keep your legs together” and said “I know you deal with the place she works at…um, was that you she’s talking about?”
Would you want her to just delete the post or would you want something more done about it?
I get customers calling me at worked that are worked up into a huge tizzy over things that are so much smaller that this. Demanding employees get fired for things like “The cashier didn’t say hi to me when I walked in” or “I got there 7 minutes after you closed and they wouldn’t unlock the door and let me shop, that’s horrible customer service”
But something like this is so over the top. Keep in mind, it’s not like she was at the bar talking about it with her friends and someone overheard it, she posted it on facebook. She put it out there in a place where it can’t be taken back anymore.
Now, I’m not saying everyone needs to run and email her company, I don’t even think I would do it, but I don’t think it would be assholish or fucked up to do so. I think she would certainly deserve it. If she wants to be in the medical field, it’s a life lesson she’s going to have to learn. You do what you do at work and when you punch out you shut your mouth about it.
It does make me wonder if HIPAA regulations will need to be adjusted due to social media? I think (and I could be wrong) that a lot of HIPAA stuff was set up to make sure if Joan Smith happen to catch a glance of a check in sheet on the counter at the doctor’s office, she didn’t see her neighbors name on it or that when she was having her blood drawn she couldn’t (easily) see a list of other names. But in this day and age, it’s not that hard for the layman to very quickly spread some information to several hundred people, even by accident. Will HIPAA be adjusted to say that information picked up in the workplace can’t be taken out of it. IOW, will legal policies ever be put in place to prevent what the OP described?
Yeah, because stealing paperclips is the same as talking about how many abortions someone had.
Well if it was just someone I knew in passing acquaintance, I’d definitely do either 3 or 4. As has been said already, what she did was NOT ok. The fact that she seems to think it is, is even worse. Her company needs to know this is going on.
But you know her, even if it’s not closely, and that makes it a bit trickier. I know if it were my friend I’d definitely not want to potentially get them fired. However, I’d still want to let them know that what they were doing wasn’t ok. In that case, I’d probably go with a PM and just keep it factual.