Snooping in records has a history at UCLA

Though UCLA Medical Center has portrayed recent privacy breaches as the rare actions of rogue employees, the hospital has known since at least 1995 that staffers were peeking into the medical records of such prominent patients as Tom Cruise and Mariah Carey -- and even spying on one another's medical care, according to records and interviews.

James Duckstad, a former hospital assistant at UCLA, told The Times that he was one of a group of workers fired in 1995 after improperly looking at the computerized medical records of colleagues as well as celebrities including Cruise and Dom DeLuise.

"People knew that we were looking up celebrities and other patients," said Duckstad, 41. "It was news throughout the whole hospital that employees were fired for screwing around in the computer. This was in 1995, and here we are 13 years later -- and either they didn't follow the policy or people didn't take it that seriously."

Duckstad, now a swimming instructor, said he never sold the information to tabloids or otherwise shared what he learned. He said his motive was "just boredom" on the night shift.

The snooping continued.

In 2001, while pop star Carey was a patient in UCLA's psychiatric unit, a nurse looked in her records, asked her for an autograph and showed it to teenage patients, according to one of her former colleagues, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The nurse was terminated, said the source and another person familiar with the matter.

Hospital employees also were caught looking at the records of former Beatle George Harrison, who received chemotherapy at UCLA and died in 2001, and John Phillips, a co-founder of the band the Mamas and the Papas, who died the same year, according to a former senior UCLA official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. The official did not know what happened to the workers.

"I knew there were internal leaks inside the hospital," the official said. "I knew there were people who were being paid [by tabloids] to look through records."

The stakes for hospitals grew in 2003 when a federal law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, put in place criminal and civil sanctions for breaches of patient confidentiality.

But the Coalition of University Employees complained in 2004 that two supervisors charged with training staffers about the privacy law were surreptitiously digging into their subordinates' UCLA medical records.