Broncos crash victims’ records improperly accessed: privacy chief
SASKATOON The organization governing Saskatchewan physicians says ensuring medical staff are aware of privacy rules is critical after the province’s privacy commissioner found that seven people inappropriately accessed the medical records of up to nine people involved in the Humboldt Broncos bus crash.
Sixteen people were killed and ano ther 13 injured when the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League team’s bus collided with a tractor-trailer at a highway intersection north of Tisdale on April 6, 2018. Three days later, the Saskatchewan Health Authority flagged related medical records to track who viewed them.
In a series of reports published last month, Information and Privacy Commissioner Ron Kruzeniski concluded that an employee at a medical clinic in Moose Jaw, a physician at a clinic in Humboldt and three other Saskatchewan Health Authority physicians accessed the medical records in the days after the crash. Kruzeniski also concluded that the records of a person involved in the collision were inappropriately accessed by a University of Saskatchewan medical resident just over one month after the crash.
The Moose Jaw clinic employee accessed the records of two people killed in the crash despite not having a “legitimate need to know,” Kruzeniski wrote.
In another instance, the record-viewer log in the Humboldt physician’s office recorded “events” where the records of two people involved in the crash were accessed, he wrote. In that case, the clinic explained to ehealth Saskatchewan that the physician wanted to know what injuries the person suffered or if the person was an “instant fatality.” The physician was “concerned” about the crash victim, Kruzeniski wrote before concluding that the Humboldt physician “did not have a need to know.”
“Neither individual requested nor required care from (the physician) as both were deceased,” Kruzeniski said in the report, which was reported on first by The Canadian Press.
Brian Salte, the associate registrar and lawyer for the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan, said the findings point to an incomplete understanding by people in the health-care field about the difference between privacy rules in different provinces. He noted Kruzeniski’s references to health-care staff who believed they were part of the “circle of care.”
These were not instances of someone looking up their daughter’s boyfriend or something similar, “which is a whole different issue,” Salte said. “It’s certainly an understandable situation where, as a physician, you provided emergency care to a patient and you’re wondering whether, after transfer, they survived or what happened to them.
“It’s an understandable human response, but that’s not consistent with the legislation,” he added.
Salte said it is a concern for CPSS, which has since talked about “educational efforts that we can go to to try to have physicians understand that there’s still a need-to-know principle under the legislation as it currently reads so that they should not be looking up information about patients that they don’t need to provide ongoing care to those patients.”
Scott Thomas, whose 18-year-old son Evan died in the collision, said the privacy breaches Kruzeniski reported on are not a big concern to him and his wife, Laurie.
“It was tragic and we are sure the people involved only wanted to feel a human connection to it,” Thomas said. “We really have no strong reaction to it one way or another.”
Kruzeniski made several non-binding recommendations in his reports, including that the three Saskatchewan Health Authority doctors and U of S resident be audited monthly for up to three years, that the Humboldt clinic appoint a privacy officer and that it regularly remind staff of the needto-know principle.
The privacy commissioner also concluded that the circle-of-care concept is in “direct contradiction” of the province’s Health Information Protection Act.
Reached by phone on Tuesday, Kruzeniski declined to comment.
Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, who was driving the semi involved in the collision, pleaded guilty to 16 counts of dangerous driving causing death and 13 counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm. His sentencing hearing in Melfort ended last month, with a decision expected in March.