David Versus Goliath -- And Goliath's Bigger Brothers, Backed By The Persian Army
Buried inside the Chron's Bay Area section a while back, we found a story about an East Bay blogger who is currently embroiled in a court battle against Kaiser Permantente. As we're always looking out for the underdog here at SFist, our "benefit of the doubt" went out to the blogger, and not the massive HMO. We're funny like that.
The woman in question, who goes by the handle "Diva of Disgruntled," painted a sordid tale of mistreatment at the hands of her managers when she worked at Kaiser. What really resonated with us was her about page, which pretty much summed up many of our feelings regarding the internal culture and politics of the workplace at large corporations.
After getting the shaft at the office, and having the Human Resources department destroy documents relating to her case, 'Disgruntled' had to resort to using Google in her search for evidence to support her case. Incidentally, she ended up finding a cache of documents that had been up for years relating to a health-care records system that Kaiser was using. And buried in those documents was data that, while purportedly "sample data," was actual confidential patient information from the medical records of around 140 people.
That's when all hell pretty much broke loose, and now she says that she is being scapegoated by Kaiser in an effort to cover up their own mistake. Unfortunately, she doesn't have the resources to retain legal counsel, and just yesterday had to appear before a judge to argue her case against a team of lawyers. We asked her a few questions about the situation, and are reprinting her own words here in the hopes of countering what we agree has been pretty shoddy treatment by the mainstream media.
Have you had a chance to look over the injunction yet? Are there any parts that seem to help or hurt your case?
No. But I'm upset that the Judge discussed adding new language when he hadn't even read through my side of the case.
We know that at one point it was suggested that you might have taken your case to the media first, but chose to mirror the content instead. Do you feel that by publishing online you were doing just that? Do you think that if you had taken the story to a major newspaper that it would have been treated fairly?
I did take it to the media first: I emailed a number of Bay Area reporters from major venues such as the Chronicle and the Tribune. Initially, I just linked to the public web site, and I wrote to reporters about it. None of the reporters chose to cover it. I mirrored the site in order to preserve the evidence. I only reposted it myself when the original site mysteriously disappeared, and I had been unable to raise public awareness. I didn't even get a verification that the Office of Civil Rights was Investigating my HIPAA complaint until months later. I never intended to keep the Systems Diagrams up for a significant period of time, even with the two possible items of patient information that I knew about. The problem was it took the OCR months to investigate, and I kept trying to get the media interested. Even when Kaiser finally issued a Cease & Desist notice, it didn't seem to me that anyone other than Kaiser had even noticed. In my mind, Kaiser was going to get away with making the evidence disappear, and none of the people affected would ever be the wiser. I asked my blog readers to complain about it: it was the only way I could get people to notice before the evidence was destroyed.
How related do you think your termination at Kaiser and the discovery of the data, aside from the obvious connection that you found the documents when looking for other documents pertaining to your previous case?
There is an important connection in terms of how I responded to finding the Systems Diagrams. If I had not had direct experience of Kaiser destroying evidence, manipulating procedure, etc., I might have taken a different approach. As it was, my top priotity was to get the evidence on the table before it could go up in smoke. I still believe that no matter what happens to me, the 140 people will eventually be thanking me. They will realize what the issue is when they try to file their own complaint with Kaiser and they get blocked at every turn and can't get the evidence when they ask for it.
Now that the Systems Diagrams are no longer accessible, those 140 people can't even tell what sort of information they actually contained. Kaiser can just wave the red cape of a disgruntled employee posting some mysterious patient information, and they are hoping people will just charge the cape instead of looking at how their private information got onto a public web site in the first place. I'd like to re-iterate once more that this information was on the Internet for a year before I found it.
Have you contacted any of the patients in the case, like the person at the Mercury News who was contacted by Kaiser?
No - not even the person at the Mercury News. I wish I knew what they thought. I hope they know that I was genuinely trying to do the right thing here.
Has Kaiser issued any press releases related to the case to any reporters (if not publicly)? Has anyone at NBC gotten back to you about the edits to your interview?
I haven't seen any Kaiser press releases. Everyone seems to be in touch with Kaiser Senior Issues Management Consultant Matthew Schiffgens, though. Kaiser has not yet corrected the Chronicle about their false claim that I tried to sell patient data on eBay, though. The Kaiser lawyers said that the Chronicle reporter drew his own conclusions, but the Chronicle reporter says he was drawing from a Kaiser quote. I've asked the Chronicle reporter to go back to Kaiser to verify the facts. Hopefully, he will write a retraction.
Thank you for asking about NBC. I haven't heard back from anyone there, but I think it's highly likely that they will rerun the segment in light of the Injunction today. I'd just like people to know that the quotes from that clip were from when I was discussing my experience of being harassed by a Kaiser Private Investigator, a couple months before I even found the Systems Diagrams. I was describing how that was the moment that I turned from quietly seeking various means of recourse for my own problems to trying to fight back. I did do my best to make sure Kaiser knew it was a bad idea to send people to lurk around my house. However, that wasn't my motive for trying to bring the Systems Diagrams to light. Sure, it was a bonus to find something my former employer had done seriously wrong, but I was mainly driven by the hope of protecting the evidence from a big corporation who would seek to hide it. No matter what happens to me, 140 other little guys should win this round.
For online coverage that's balanced and informed, The Health Care Blog is on the story. Thanks also to the folks at KaiserThrive for getting in touch.