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Supreme Court rules HIPAA workers exempt from BIPA

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Illinois

* From a September story by Capitol News Illinois…

The Illinois Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a pair of class action suits brought by two suburban nurses, Lucille Mosby and Yana Mazya, who allege their employers violated the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, a landmark 2008 law that gives Illinois residents the ability to sue companies that misuse biometric data, such as fingerprints or facial scans.

It’s the same act that formed the basis of several high-profile lawsuits that have led to massive penalties or settlements, such as the $650 million Facebook agreed to pay its Illinois users after it was alleged to have misused biometric data.

The nurses allege that, by requiring the use of fingerprint scanners to open medicine cabinets, Northwestern Medicine, UChicago Medicine and Becton, Dickinson and Co. – the company that makes the medicine cabinets – violated BIPA.

According to court filings, the hospital systems did not collect written releases allowing them to use the fingerprint data, nor did the hospitals provide information about how the biometrics would be stored or eventually destroyed. They also failed to obtain consent to disclose the fingerprint data to third-party vendors that host it.

* The Supreme Court unanimously sided with the hospitals today. The justices said two questions were at issue…

“Whether the exclusion in Section 10 of [the Biometric Information Privacy Act] for ‘information collected, used, or stored for health care treatment, payment, or operations under the federal Health [I]nsurance [P]ortability and Accountability Act of 1996’ [(HIPAA)] applies to biometric information of health care workers (as opposed to patients) collected, used or stored for health care treatment, payment or operations under HIPAA,”

and

“Does finger-scan information collected by a health care provider from its employees fall within the [Act’s] exclusion for ‘information collected, used, or stored for health care treatment, payment, or operations under [HIPAA],’ when the employee’s finger-scan information is used for purposes related to ‘health care,’ ‘treatment,’ ‘payment,’ or ‘operations’ as those terms are defined by the HIPAA statute and regulations?”

The appellate court had earlier said no to both, finding that “if the legislature intended to exclude all health care workers from the Act’s protections, it would have done so.” Hospitals freaked out, but the Illinois Supreme Court just ruled the biometric scans were excluded from the state’s infamous Biometric Information Privacy Act, or BIPA.

* Like with the other Supreme Court case we discussed today, the plain language of the statute was at the heart of the matter…

When the statutory language is plain and unambiguous, a court may not “depart from a statute’s plain language by reading into the law exceptions, limitations, or conditions that the legislature did not express.” Schultz v. Illinois Farmers Insurance Co., 237 Ill. 2d 391, 408 (2010). “Nevertheless, in construing a statute, the court may consider the reason for the law, the problems sought to be remedied, the purposes to be achieved, and the consequences of construing the statute one way or another.” McDonald v. Symphony Bronzeville Park, LLC, 2022 IL 126511, ¶ 18.

* Yadda, yadda, yadda and after a whole lot of word parsing…

Pursuant to its plain language, the Act excludes from its protections the biometric information of health care workers where that information is collected, used, or stored for health care treatment, payment, or operations, as those functions are defined by HIPAA. A health care worker’s biometric information, used to permit access to medication dispensing stations for patient care, falls under “information collected, used, or stored for health care treatment, payment, or operations under [HIPAA]” and is exempt from the Act’s protections pursuant to section 10 of the Act. […]

For the foregoing reasons, we answer the certified questions in the affirmative, reverse the judgment of the appellate court, and remand the cause to the circuit court for further proceedings.

[Hat tip: Hannah Meisel]

posted by Rich Miller
Thursday, Nov 30, 23 @ 1:56 pm

Comments

Two unanimous Illinois Supreme Court decisions being discussed today. One of the opinions written by a Democrat, the other by a Republican. Wait, I thought during the last SC election campaigns that if Democrats were elected the majority there would be no such thing as a unanimous decision anymore. The majority would just ram woke stuff down the the minority’s throats. Not that I except every future decision to be unanimous, but maybe we actually have a court that will act not as partisans, but as impartial arbiters. That’s the it should be, contrary to the way SCOTUS operates.

Comment by West Side the Best Side Thursday, Nov 30, 23 @ 4:17 pm