Dispensary Corner

IT’S hard to imagine being so foolish to spy on someone’s electronic health record once, but a Canadian pharmacist has recently been suspended from practice for six months for spying on the data of 46 different people.

In Jul, the Nova Scotia College of Pharmacists suspended Robyn Keddy’s license to practice pharmacy and fined her $5,000.

She was also ordered to pay another $4,000 in costs and complete a course in business ethics.

Keddy, the manager of a Nova Scotia pharmacy operated by Sobeys, targeted her former classmates, a person with whom she’d had a car accident, her doctor and even her child’s girlfriend, using the provincial Drug Information System to trawl through their records over the course of two years.

Keddy was also overheard discussing the details with her husband, telling him their child could no longer see his girlfriend as a result of the medications the young woman and her parents had been prescribed.

Nova Scotia Information and Privacy Commissioner Catherine Tully found Keddy had even created false profiles to access the system.

This was not enough though, as she continued to access the information even after her suspension.

There’s every chance Keddy probably said “just this once”, before embarking on her intrusive jaunt.