N.H. court orders hospital to grant EHR access for hep C outbreak case
In an effort to determine how many patients have come in contact with a lab technician accused of spreading hepatitis C, New Hampshire's Merrimack County Superior Court ordered Exeter Hospital to provide public health officials with access to the hospital's EHR system, so an investigation into the hepatitis C outbreak can continue.
The lab technician, David Kwiatkowski, has the disease, and authorities said the Michigan native injected himself with painkillers meant for patients when he worked at Exeter and left the syringes for reuse.
Kwiatkowski was arrested in July in connection with spreading the disease at Exeter and has been charged with obtaining controlled substances by fraud and tampering with a consumer product, according to an affidavit filed in federal court. He is suspected of stealing fentanyl, a powerful analgesic that is substantially more potent than morphine, the affidavit said.
Thirty Exeter patients have been diagnosed with the same strain of hepatitis C that Kwiatkowski has. Now, officials want to be sure that outbreak has not spread past New England.
Kwiatkowski worked as a traveling medical technician on a contract basis for hospitals in Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania in the past five years, hospitals and health officials in those states confirmed.
In August, Exeter challenged an order by the state's Division of Public Health Services to release patient records as part of an investigation into the outbreak. The hospital argued that it would be violating state and federal law if it provided unfettered access to its EHR system.
In the ruling, Merrimack County Superior Court Judge Richard McNamara said that although state law requires officials to acquire and retain only the minimum necessary data for an investigation, it does not prohibit investigators from seeing non-relevant patient data.
The court acknowledged that state law "explicitly bestows the responsibility of conducting outbreak investigations while simultaneously protecting certain health information to the trained professionals of the [state Department of Health and Human Services]."
In response to the ruling, Exeter said it was confident that seeking guidance from the court was the right thing to do for patients.
The hospital in a statement said that the judge's decision "provides important guidance to both the hospital and the state, and will allow the hospital to further fulfill its obligations to the state's investigation and our patients."