LOS ANGELES - UCLA Health System has agreed to pay $865,500 as part of a settlement with federal regulators Wednesday after two celebrity patients alleged hospital employees broke the law and reviewed their medical records without authorization.
Federal and hospital officials declined to identify the celebrities involved. The complaints cover 2005 to 2009, a time during which hospital employees were repeatedly caught and fired for peeping at the medical records of dozens of celebrities, including Britney Spears, Farrah Fawcett and former California first lady Maria Shriver.
The security breaches were first reported in the Times in 2008.
The violations led state lawmakers to pass a law imposing escalating fines on hospitals for patient privacy lapses.
After the law took effect on Jan. 1, 2009, state regulators fined Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center $95,000 in connection with privacy breaches that year that sources said involved the medical records of Michael Jackson, who died at the hospital in June 2009.
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The same month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights began investigating alleged violations of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act at the hospitals, according to the settlement agreement.
Investigators found that UCLA employees examined private electronic records "repeatedly and without a permissible reason" in 2005 and 2008, including an employee in the director of nursing's office, according to the agreement.
The employee was not named in the agreement, but appears to be Lawanda Jackson, an administrative specialist at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center who was fired in 2007 after she was caught accessing Fawcett's medical records and allegedly selling information to the National Enquirer.
Jackson later pleaded guilty to a felony charge of violating federal medical privacy laws for commercial purposes but died of cancer before she could be sentenced. Fawcett died of cancer in 2009.
