News in brief - Feb. 21, 2011

Hospital employees fired for snooping at Iowa football players' records

Three employees at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics were fired and two others placed on a five-day unpaid leave after a probe confirmed that they had breached the medical records of 13 Iowa football players who had been hospitalized.

The players affected by the breach were notified in person and in writing, and those players not affected also were notified. The incident will be reported to the Dept. of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights.

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Consumer confidence in paying for health care stabilizes

Patients started to feel better in December 2010 about their ability to pay for medical services, and this trend continued into January, says the Consumer Healthcare Sentiment Index, released Feb. 8 by Thomson Reuters.

The index, created by surveying a representative sample of 3,000 households about the ability to pay for care in the past three months and their belief in being able to do so in the next three, reached 97 in December 2010.

The number was 98 in January after hitting a low of 95 in November 2010. The increase was primarily due to patients feeling like they were going to be more likely to afford health care in the future.

The January Consumer Healthcare Sentiment Index report is available online (healthcarescience.thomsonreuters.com/Indexes/assets/jan2011index_chsi-electronic.pdf).

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WellPoint conducts research on comparative effectiveness

HealthCore, the research arm of WellPoint, has teamed up with AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals to conduct comparative effectiveness research on how well medicines and treatments are working in treating chronic illnesses.

The groups will focus on drugs already on the market. Their research will include prospective and retrospective studies on disease and provide insight into new types of therapies needed for treating and preventing disease.

Unlike controlled studies, the research will involve real-world analysis of data found in electronic medical records as well as claims information and patient surveys.

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Accord reached in Facebook dispute

The National Labor Relations Board has announced that it reached a settlement with a Connecticut ambulance service that it claimed illegally fired an employee for comments made on Facebook.

The NLRB's Hartford regional office issued a complaint against American Medical Response of Connecticut after it dismissed an employee for making derogatory comments about her boss on Facebook. The NLRB argued that the employee's Facebook posts were a protected activity because the employee was discussing terms and conditions of her employment.

The employee at the center of the dispute posted comments about her boss after she was denied union representation to help her prepare a response to a customer's complaint.

The board said the ambulance company has overly broad rules in its handbook regarding blogging, Internet posting and communications among employees. It also said the company illegally denied union representation to the employee.

Under terms of the settlement, the company must revise its employee handbook to reflect policies that do not improperly restrict employees from discussing their wages, hours and working conditions with co-workers when not at work. The policy must state that it will not discipline employees for engaging in such activity. The company promised it would not deny union representation and that employees would not be disciplined for requesting union representation.

When the case was made public last fall, attorneys advised physicians to revisit social media policies to prevent similar situations at their practices.

The print version of this content appeared in the Feb. 28 issue of American Medical News.

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