# Confidentiality and Celebs in Hospitals **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [May 20, 2011, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604 "2011-05-20T18:29:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Hazle\_Weatherfield](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Hazle\_Weatherfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hazle_Weatherfield)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/1 "2011-05-20T18:29:44Z")
Watching a pregnant Jessica Alba on Ellen today made me wonder: In hospitals where there is likely to be a much higher population of celebrities than elsewhere, is it required that the doctors/nurses, etc. sign additional confidentiality statements or do the basic rules do the trick? How are these admissions/births/what have you kept secret, for the most part? ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/2 "2011-05-20T18:33:29Z")
HIIPA covers everyone. It does not stop non-medical(including administrative) personnel from releasing information. ---
**Author:** ![Sally\_Mander](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e56c9b/32.png) [@Sally\_Mander](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sally_Mander)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/3 "2011-05-20T18:49:42Z")
It’s [HIPAA](http://www.hipaa.org/), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. But, yeah, HIPAA laws should cover it. ---
**Author:** ![constanze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f9ae1b/32.png) [@constanze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/constanze)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/4 "2011-05-20T19:32:19Z")
[Having a celebrity in the hospital affects the care to other patients](http://www.cracked.com/article_19197_the-7-most-ridiculous-cases-misplaced-priorities_p2.html), though: > [@](#): > > In early 2005, the late Michael Jackson threw up in his car on his way to his child molestation trial. We could make a lot of comedy guesses as to the cause, but the symptoms suggested that the 46-year-old Jackson had stomach flu. He was rushed to the Marion Medical Center so that he could be properly treated. > > When Jackson was brought into the emergency room, one of its occupants was Manuela Gomez Ruiz, an elderly woman who was recovering from a heart attack – which you may recognize as being a serious medical condition. The staff of the Marion Medical Center, bound by their duty to care for those in need, removed Ruiz from her ventilator and took her to a smaller room to give the flu-stricken King of Pop more room. ---
**Author:** ![Ferret\_Herder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e47774/32.png) [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 7:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/5 "2011-05-20T19:49:14Z")
> [@runner pat](#): > > HIIPA covers everyone. > > It does not stop non-medical(including administrative) personnel from releasing information. Even non-medical employees in a hospital are bound by HIPAA regulations, and there are serious legal penalties for breaching them - assuming the hospital can determine who did this, of course. There’s nothing stopping another patient from spreading news of who they saw in the waiting room, either. As a hospital employee, I’m equally forbidden from telling people that I saw my mother-in-law walk into the cancer clinic as I am from telling people I saw Oprah walk in there. I suspect that since more people know Oprah, she’d be whisked in through a back entrance or at a special time, or something. ---
**Author:** ![Jane\_D\_oh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/839c29/32.png) [@Jane\_D\_oh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jane_D_oh)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/6 "2011-05-20T20:40:00Z")
> [@Ferret\_Herder](#): > > As a hospital employee, I’m equally forbidden from telling people that I saw my mother-in-law walk into the cancer clinic as I am from telling people I saw Oprah walk in there. I suspect that since more people know Oprah, she’d be whisked in through a back entrance or at a special time, or something. Oprah has cancer? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/7 "2011-05-20T20:47:14Z")
> [@Ferret\_Herder](#): > > Even non-medical employees in a hospital are bound by HIPAA regulations, and there are serious legal penalties for breaching them - assuming the hospital can determine who did this, of course. There’s nothing stopping another patient from spreading news of who they saw in the waiting room, either. > > As a hospital employee, I’m equally forbidden from telling people that I saw my mother-in-law walk into the cancer clinic as I am from telling people I saw Oprah walk in there. I suspect that since more people know Oprah, she’d be whisked in through a back entrance or at a special time, or something. I imagine that Oprah is slightly more likely that your mother-in-law to sick a team of lawyers after the hospital & you getting you fired and driven to bankruptcy. 😉 I could be wrong though. And AFAIK HIPAA covers every single employee at a given hospital or clinic; all the way down to cleaning staff. I know I once threatened to sue a receptionist who almost gave out my room number to visiting family. She sounded genuinly terrified over the phone when I didn. ---
**Author:** ![Markxxx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5daacb/32.png) [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/8 "2011-05-20T21:28:14Z")
> [@Hazle\_Weatherfield](#): > > Watching a pregnant Jessica Alba on Ellen today made me wonder: In hospitals where there is likely to be a much higher population of celebrities than elsewhere, is it required that the doctors/nurses, etc. sign additional confidentiality statements or do the basic rules do the trick? How are these admissions/births/what have you kept secret, for the most part? I worked in a high end hotel in Chicago and we had a lot of celebrities stay with us. It’s expected that you keep your mouth shut up where they are staying and their goings on. Even if it’s stupid, For instance, I worked at the Westin on Mich Ave (10+ years ago) and we had most of the baseball teams stay with us (Except for the NY Yankees, they were too good for the Westin and went to the Ritz :)) Anyway, EVERYONE knew the teams stayed there. It was all over the Internet yet you constantly had to deny it if asked. Just FYI, baseball teams are VERY strict about the code of conduct. So when you deal with hospitals the staff just goes out of the way to make sure everyone keeps it unknown when a famous person stays there. I’m not talking medical info, just regular knowledge. ---
**Author:** ![Ferret\_Herder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e47774/32.png) [@Ferret\_Herder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ferret_Herder)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/9 "2011-05-20T23:12:04Z")
> [@Jane\_D\_oh](#): > > Oprah has cancer? 😃 😛 I haven’t personally seen any celebrities on the job. I was told a story by a pharma rep about how he met a particular celebrity in the hospital where I worked, and shared a story about the clinic that person went to. However, I really can’t share the story since it happened at my workplace; it would be too easy to point at me as having seen the person myself and thus violated HIPAA. ---
**Author:** ![Shagnasty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@Shagnasty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shagnasty)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/10 "2011-05-20T23:33:38Z")
> [@runner pat](#): > > HIIPA covers everyone. > > It does not stop non-medical(including administrative) personnel from releasing information. Absolutely not true. HIIPA is a strict law and specifically includes anyone that sees anything remotely medically confidential as part of their job. An administrative assistant even saying who came to see the doctor that day is a violation because the doctor could be a specialist in pancreatic cancer. I used to work with HIIPA data as a 3rd party provider and even the non-specific info we had was under high-security. A regular person is free to blab that they saw Celebrity X in the waiting room for an addiction specialist but no one on staff is. The potential legal consequences of HIIPA violations can be severe. ---
**Author:** ![thirdname](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/d07c76/32.png) [@thirdname](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thirdname)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2011, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/11 "2011-05-20T23:54:16Z")
What I don’t understand is how there can be all this protection once they’re in the hospital, but when they call 911 for medical assistance, the tapes are given to the press for everybody to listen to and laugh at. Isn’t that wrong? Do we want people to refrain from calling 911 with embarrassing problems because they’re going to end up on the news? ---
**Author:** ![running\_coach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/running_coach/32/15836_2.png) [@running\_coach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/running_coach)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2011, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/12 "2011-05-21T00:20:13Z")
> [@Shagnasty](#): > > Absolutely not true. HIIPA is a strict law and specifically includes anyone that sees anything remotely medically confidential as part of their job. An administrative assistant even saying who came to see the doctor that day is a violation because the doctor could be a specialist in pancreatic cancer. I used to work with HIIPA data as a 3rd party provider and even the non-specific info we had was under high-security. > > A regular person is free to blab that they saw Celebrity X in the waiting room for an addiction specialist but no one on staff is. The potential legal consequences of HIIPA violations can be severe. :smack: I goofed up the wording. I was thinking of gossip columnists/photographers/etc and then thought of non medical staff in a hospital/clinic and jammed the two together. ---
**Author:** ![samjones](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@samjones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samjones)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2011, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/13 "2011-05-21T13:36:57Z")
> [@thirdname](#): > > What I don’t understand is how there can be all this protection once they’re in the hospital, but when they call 911 for medical assistance, the tapes are given to the press for everybody to listen to and laugh at. Isn’t that wrong? Do we want people to refrain from calling 911 with embarrassing problems because they’re going to end up on the news? 911 is public record. Mrs. Sam worked for years in the behavorial health unit of a hospital that would frequently serve celebrities. HIPAA was conceived in response to a specific celebrity incident - the leak of Arthur Ashe’s AIDS test results. When a celebrity or the member of a celebrity’s family was being admitted the staff were warned, in threatening and intimidating ways, that they are bound by HIPAA laws. You get caught releasing information you don’t just lose your job, you lose your career and that thought can be kindof hard to swallow for these people because they work pretty hard to gain entry to the medical profession. I recall one time a celeb entered the hospital for a particularly well publicized reason and the hospital administration sent out an email where they seemed to fire Mrs. Sam and everyone else at the hospital and then offered to rehire them at a later date only if it could be proven that they didn’t say anything about the celebrity’s diagnosis or treatment. ---
**Author:** ![pendgwen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3da27b/32.png) [@pendgwen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pendgwen)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2011, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/14 "2011-05-21T14:35:59Z")
What I don’t get is how hospital workers are still dumb enough to violate HIPAA on celebrities. Seems like every time there’s a new story about a celebrity being hospitalized there’s another story a couple of weeks later about how many people were fired at the hospital for accessing their medical records. We had a celebrity come through the ED where I work last year. We have an electronic medical record and I normally assign myself as part of the treatment team for all patients in my area at the start of my shift. The celebrity was registered under a pseudonym by the time I started work but when I heard who it really was I deliberately did not assign myself and let the attending handle everything about his care so that there could be no possible question of my inappropriately accessing his record. Later the hospital administration called a meeting with the ED chief of service and sat down with a list of everyone who had accessed his record, how often and at what times. And sure enough there was at least one idiot who had entered his record inappropriately. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2011, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/15 "2011-05-21T15:31:28Z")
Long before HIPPA hospitals had provisions in place for celebrities. They would be checked in and their records maintained with pseodonyms. Disclosure of private information, or even the fact the celebrity was in the hospital would result in job termination. A couple of SoCal hospitals were my clients, and they took this very seriously. Besides the appeal of having celebrities use their hospitals, they extracted high prices for the luxury private rooms and services that that would be paid for. These measures were actually more secure than the HIPPA regulations. In case you are curious, proposals for medical privacy that were meant to protect individuals were all discarded in favor of the current regulations designed to make sure nobody can hide information from medical insurers. I wonder how that happened? ---
**Author:** ![samjones](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9dc877/32.png) [@samjones](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samjones)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2011, 3:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/16 "2011-05-21T15:34:19Z")
> [@pendgwen](#): > > What I don’t get is how hospital workers are still dumb enough to violate HIPAA on celebrities. Seems like every time there’s a new story about a celebrity being hospitalized there’s another story a couple of weeks later about how many people were fired at the hospital for accessing their medical records. We had a celebrity come through the ED where I work last year. We have an electronic medical record and I normally assign myself as part of the treatment team for all patients in my area at the start of my shift. The celebrity was registered under a pseudonym by the time I started work but when I heard who it really was I deliberately did not assign myself and let the attending handle everything about his care so that there could be no possible question of my inappropriately accessing his record. Later the hospital administration called a meeting with the ED chief of service and sat down with a list of everyone who had accessed his record, how often and at what times. And sure enough there was at least one idiot who had entered his record inappropriately. They think they won’t get caught. Temptation. It stirs feelings of sad resignation when you realize that the people who are violating rules of security and confidentiality by and large are doing if for no reason other than to satisfy their own curiosity and usually they are subject-matter experts who pretty much could have told you what information they would have read without ever accessing it. The information that they dig up is generally of little interest to anyone other than a professional doing their work. “Person X entered rehab” is really the whole story. You really don’t want, need, or care to know anything more than that. It’s an exciting day in the life of an Infosec professional when he actually catches a bad guy. 99% of the time it’s just dumbness. ---
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2011, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/17 "2011-05-21T16:02:41Z")
A few years ago my father was at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles for a few days for a surgical procedure. You may recognize that name – it has treated many celebrities over the years. There are signs posted all over the place, including the inside of every elevator, that say something to the effect of “The privacy of patiends in this hospital is very important. Anyone not respecting that privacy will be asked to leave by security and/or prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” ---
**Author:** ![Hazle\_Weatherfield](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/e9bcb4/32.png) [@Hazle\_Weatherfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hazle_Weatherfield)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2011, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/18 "2011-05-21T17:28:38Z")
> [@suranyi](#): > > A few years ago my father was at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles for a few days for a surgical procedure. You may recognize that name – it has treated many celebrities over the years. > > There are signs posted all over the place, including the inside of every elevator, that say something to the effect of “The privacy of patiends in this hospital is very important. Anyone not respecting that privacy will be asked to leave by security and/or prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” A bit off topic, but there is a similar sign at Union Station (a mall) here in St. Louis with similar signs all around, what with Nelly and all the baseball players ALWAYS hanging out there. :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![Washoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ecae2f/32.png) [@Washoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Washoe)\ **Post date:** [May 21, 2011, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/confidentiality-and-celebs-in-hospitals/582604/19 "2011-05-21T17:30:29Z")
It doesn’t keep them from gossiping like high school girls. And they don’t really get fired. Look at the infamous incident involving Richard Gere and his furry little chimney sweeper. My wife worked the morning shift the day after Gere was admitted. By then it was all over the hospital. She first heard about it from the guy who rang up her breakfast in the cafeteria. By lunchtime she had heard it from half the ER staff and practically the entire respiratory department. Despite the fact that it never really happened, the gerbil was headline news. I know a guy who works in claims approval at Wellpoint who got caught accessing Lindsay Lohan’s prescription drug history. He got his ass colossally reamed, but he kept his job.