Providence worker to serve 2 years for giving medical records to drug dealer

By Tulsi Patil for KTUU.com

ANCHORAGE – An Anchorage woman was sentenced to two years in federal prison Monday for violations to medical privacy laws, U.S. Attorney Karen Loeffler’s office announced in a press release.

According to prosecutors, 33-year-old Stacy Laulu was a financial counselor at Providence Hospital in March, 2013 when she was contacted by Stuart Seugasala who asked her to access private medical records of two patients at the hospital.

Seugasala was a video game parlor owner at the time and was also trafficking drugs on the side. On March 13, 2013, Seugasala and two others kidnapped, tortured and sexually assaulted two men who owed them money. The condition of one of the victims was so severe that he was admitted to Providence Hospital for treatment.

Two days later, on March 15, in an unrelated incident, Seugasala put another person in the hospital when he shot at a person driving on Seward Highway. The victim suffered from a severed fingertip and a neck-graze wound and was also admitted to Providence Hospital for treatment.

Prosecutors wrote that Seugasala then contacted Laulu and asked her to take a look at their private medical records.

“Laulu determined the identity of one of the victims (one of whom was still hospitalized) and provided Seugasala with confidential information about the victims, including what they had told hospital staff about how they sustained their injuries, the severity of the injuries and what was reflected in hospital records about their cooperation with law enforcement,” prosecutors wrote.

Laulu communicated all the information to Seugasala via text messages and police seized her phone at the request of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Laulu admitted to sending the information to Seugasala and Providence Hospital terminated her employment.

“Evidence at the trial established that Laulu’s husband was a close friend and former co-defendant with Seugasala in a federal drug case,” prosecutors wrote. “Witnesses at Seugasala’s and Laulu’s trial testified that, at times, Seugasala would arrange to drop off drug proceeds for Laulu and her husband’s benefit.”

Laulu was sentenced to two years in prison for violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Prosecutors wrote in the press release that this case was the first felony HIPAA prosecution in Alaskan history and one of the few in the country.

Seugasala was sentenced to life imprisonment on May 18.

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US House Bill Introduced to Stop ICD-10

Article by Chris Dimick, Editor-in-chief at the Journal of AHIMA. This article was originally published on the Journal of AHIMA website on May 4, 2015 and is republished here with permission.

A bill has been introduced into the US House of Representatives that would stop the implementation of ICD-10-CM/PCS.

The bill, H.R. 2126, would “prohibit the Secretary of Health and Human Services from replacing ICD-9 with ICD-10 in implementing the HIPAA code set.” Introduced by Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) on April 30, H.R. 2126 has been referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Committee on Ways and Means.

Rep. Poe is a long-time opponent of the ICD-10 implementation. In 2013 he introduced a nearly identical bill into the House of Representatives on April 24, 2013, H.R. 1701, that also called for prohibiting HHS from replacing ICD-9 with ICD-10. That bill failed to gain traction and was never taken up by the referred House committees, according to Congress.gov.

H.R. 2126 is co-sponsored by Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX), Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-AL), Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Morgan H. Griffith (R-VA), Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), and Rep. David P. Roe (R-TN).

AHIMA and the Coalition for ICD-10 have called on ICD-10 supporters to continue their advocacy efforts and contact their representatives and senators to prevent any future delay of ICD-10.

Posted by Traci Miller on May 7, 2015

“Mobile is changing everything”

DoctorBase Passes 3 Million Patients On Its Mobile Messaging Platform

March 25, 2013 By Steve Campbell 0 Comments and 6 Reactions

DoctorBase.com, a service allowing physicians to offer their patients secure, medically oriented smartphone access, has announced that they have surpassed three million patients and more than 9,000 healthcare providers on its platform. They also announced a free version of their product will be available to licensed providers in the U.S. starting today.

Created by former developers from Five9 and LiveJournal, working with a team of primary care doctors and specialists ranging from OB/GYN to Oncology, San Francisco-based DoctorBase believes that mHealth-as-a-Service is the solution to expensive, cumbersome patient portals that have failed to gain traction with either providers or patients.

“Mobile is changing everything,” said John Sung Kim, CEO of DoctorBase.com. “Now that health systems are starting to wake up to the benefits of cloud computing and the Internet, they’re so late to the party that it’s no longer about that paradigm – patients across all demographics now use smartphones as their primary connectivity device. That’s leaving both doctors and patients communicating with each other in non-HIPAA compliant, unsecured ways such as email and text for the simple sake of convenience.”