Anti-snooping legislation to protect health info coming to Sask.

The Saskatchewan government says it will create a "snooping offence"to deal with health-care employees who improperly access people's personal files.

Creating a specific snooping offenceis one of a series of recommendations a government committee recently released to improve protection of health information.

"I support these recommendations and I intend to seek approval to bring forward the legislative amendments," Health Minister Dustin Duncan said Thursday in a news release.

The snooping offencewill cover inappropriate use of personal information by employees who access files without a professional reason for doing so.

It follows a series of serious privacy breaches detailed last year by the privacy commissioner's office:

• In one case, an employee at the Regina General Hospital looked up a co-worker's health records and displayed them on a computer screen while other workers looked over her shoulder.
• In a second case, an employee went into another employee's electronic records seven times, put vulgarities in the file and added the acronym "RIP".
• A third case involved an employee who went into another employee's records for reasons that appeared to be "intentional, malicious and for personal gain," according to then-privacy commissioner Gary Dickson.

The cases resulted in suspensions and other disciplinary measures.

Dickson said the three cases suggested that unauthorized viewing of medical files via electronic information systems was becoming a chronic issue.

Duncan said the province will move forward on the snooping offence recommendation, as well as others that include:

• In reference to some high-profile cases where medical records ended up in dumpsters, a requirement that doctors and other health-care record trusteesshow that they took all reasonable steps to prevent the records from being abandoned.
• Arequirement that there be a quick response in cases where abandoned medical records are found.
• Arecognition that employees of health-care record trustees, and not just the trustees, are also responsible for inappropriate release of private medical records.