Former UCLA Medical Center researcher Huping Zhou pleads guilty to viewing confidential records
By Shweta Saraswat
Jan. 12, 2010 9:56 p.m.
A former UCLA Medical Center researcher has entered a conditional guilty plea to charges of viewing the confidential medical records of celebrities and other patients.
Huping Zhou, 38, is a former Chinese surgeon who was working as a researcher in the medical center until his dismissal in 2003.
Zhou is charged with four counts of violating federal medical privacy law for allegedly viewing confidential UCLA patient records 323 times in the months surrounding his dismissal, according to U.S. District Attorney’s Office spokesperson Thom Mrozek. The issue of his allegedly viewing these records came to light during the litigation surrounding Zhou’s dismissal, according to Zhou’s attorney Edward Robinson. Zhou faces a maximum penalty of four years in prison.
“A huge chunk of this viewing was done from the moment (Zhou) knew he was going to be terminated,” Mrozek said.
According to Robinson, Zhou did not know that looking at the records was a federal crime. Robinson also said at the time Zhou was working at UCLA, employees did not receive any significant training on the consequences of looking at confidential information.
“This is a misdemeanor, not a felony,” Robinson said, “There will be no jury trial because (Zhou) entered a guilty plea (indicating) he knowingly looked at confidential medical records. There is no evidence at all that he disseminated, sold or gave out any of this information and no evidence that he did it for profit or anything like that.”
The UCLA Health System has been fully cooperative with the investigation and said in a statement that it is “pleased with the successful prosecution of former UCLA employee, Huping Zhou.”
The guilty plea was conditional because Zhou plans to argue that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act he allegedly violated was one that an ordinary person would not have known about, according to Robinson.
Though Zhou is set to be sentenced in March, Robinson said the imposition of that sentence will be stayed pending the outcome of Zhou’s appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court.
“If the Ninth Circuit (court) rules in (Zhou’s) favor, overturning the trial court judge’s ruling, Zhou can withdraw his guilty plea,” Mrozek said. “There’s no downside to us if that happened … presumably we can go to trial again, starting from exactly where we were last week.”
Robinson doesn’t expect to hear the appeal decision for another year and a half. He said it is important to preserve Zhou’s right to make this specific appeal because “it is a matter of first impressions … no one had done a trial like this in the nation,” referring to the fact that this case is among the first of its kind in the U.S.
Regarding the sentencing, Mrozek said he expects the prosecutors to ask for a jail term.
“I don’t know what that is going to be,” Mrozek said, “although it will certainly be less than the maximum of four years.”
Robinson is more optimistic, saying “Zhou has no criminal record and is a hard worker … I don’t foresee him getting any jail time.”
This is not the first time UCLA Medical Center records have been illegally viewed. In 2008, former UCLA employee Lawanda Jackson pleaded guilty to illegally viewing the medical records of Farrah Fawcett and Britney Spears, among others. Jackson sold the information to the National Enquirer but died of complications from breast cancer before she could be sentenced.
Though many of Zhou’s alleged records breaches involved celebrities, the patients were not named in the plea agreement.
A UCLA Health System representative said in a statement that they have added new safeguards to protect patient confidentiality in recent months, including a new requirement to give a reason for accessing a clinical record and the masking of the first five digits of Social Security Numbers in the center’s information system.
The Health System has also created a new HIPAA training and certification module which all doctors, staff and students completed in August.
