The California Department of Public Health has fined six hospitals and a nursing home a total of $792,500 for failing to prevent unauthorized access to patient data.

Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield was hit with the largest of the civil penalties, $250,000, for losing 596 patient records that were allegedly stowed in an outside, unlocked locker, and another fine of $60,000 for allowing two employees to access and disclose one patient's medical information on three occasions.

In the first case, state inspectors found that for several months, a Kern staffer would place daily lab reports in a broken locker outside the hospital. One night they were stolen. The hospital's CEO claims the reports' disappearance was part of a Halloween prank and not the work of identity thieves.

Fines are typically $25,000 for the first breach and $17,500 for each additional breach of the same record.

In another breach, Pacific Hospital of Long Beach was hit with a $225,000 fine after an employee used nine patients' medical information to set up fake Verizon accounts. The employee admitted to memorizing personal patient information during a project to purge the hospital's older ER records.

California's patient privacy laws are among the toughest in the country, including penalties for snooping into medical records. The state law enacted in 2008 boosted patient protections after widely publicized violations of patient privacy at UCLA involving Farrah Fawcett, singer Britney Spears, Maria Shriver and other celebrities.

Last year, California health officials issued the first penalty under the law to Kaiser Permanente's Bellflower hospital, which had to pay a whopping $437,500 fine for failing to prevent employees from sneaking a peek at the medical records of Nadya Suleman, a.k.a. "Octomom," according to the Los Angeles Times.

For more information:
- see this Health Imaging and IT story
- read this Los Angeles Times story
- take a look at the Associated Press article
- here's a press release from the California Department of Public Health

Neil Versel contributed to this story.

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