The former Huntington Hospital employee accused of illegally accessing 13,000 patient records has pleaded guilty to a seven-year string of federal health-care privacy law violations.
Prosecutors allege that the former telemetry technician, Luis Soriano, was paid as much as $150,000 to disclose confidential patient information that he illegally accessed between 2012 and 2019 at three hospitals, according to court documents.
He faces up to 10 years in prison, law enforcement authorities said Friday.
Soriano is due to be sentenced April 5 by Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall in federal court in Brooklyn, court documents show. He is accused of wrongful disclosure of health information, a felony.
Soriano pleaded guilty on Jan. 29, 2020, and he is free on a $50,000 bond, law enforcement authorities said. The case was previously sealed because it was an ongoing investigation with a risk of evidence destruction or flight, court documents state.
Soriano could not be reached on Friday. His attorney, Steven Goldman of the Bronx, did not respond to requests for comment.
Huntington Hospital last month reported the breach of 13,000 patient records, which it said occurred from 2018 until early 2019.
A spokeswoman for Northwell Health, whose network includes Huntington Hospital, said in a statement, "due to our tools to monitor access to medical record applications and our regular audits of medical record access, Huntington Hospital determined that the employee improperly accessed patient...
Health care entities may be able to pay less than half the steep fines ordinarily associated with False Claims Act (FCA) violations by voluntarily reporting issues under a new pilot program launche...