Polaneczky: Tweets denigrate the sick and injured

KATHRYN KNOTT'S lawyer insists that his client, one of the Bucks County Three charged in this month's assault of a gay couple, is not homophobic, even though her Twitter account expresses the sentiment that #gay is #ew.

What far outnumber those hashtags, though, are Knott's despicable and inappropriate Twitter references to people she appears to have encountered at her job as an emergency-room tech at Lansdale Hospital, where she has worked since May 2011. She has been suspended, according to a statement from the hospital's parent company, Abington Health System, while the hospital investigates the assault charges - and the tweets.

Pray you never have to deal with this chick in an ER.

Knott's June 10, 2013, photo of an X-ray of a busted pelvis is captioned, "why would you clean your gutters in the rain? #ouch." Another, on Feb. 20, 2013, shows a clear bag containing something lumpish. Its caption reads, "A patient gave me a bag of ice with his two fingers in it!" Yet another, posted on New Year's Day 2013, shows a small spring - X-rayed in an abdomen, I think - captioned, "Kid had way too much fun at lacosta last night. Swallowed a pen spring. #rage."

Knott doesn't need photos, though, to tweet contempt for those she encounters.

On Aug. 29, 2012: "Ended my night spreading ass cheeks to suture her hemorrhoids while they pulsated blood all over me #disgusting #arewekidding?"

On March 12, 2013: "Babysitting a 36 yo 30pillxanax overdose and holding the urinal for him is definitely what I wanted to do today #winninglikeVegas."

On Dec 23, 2012: "Another patient with scabies. I CAN'T." She reiterates, on Apr. 25, 2013, "I seriously can not deal with scabies its my weakness and I refuse to go into the room #disgusting."

There's more, but you get the picture. The private medical condition of Knott's patients is fodder for her public opinion.

Has this cruel young woman never heard of HIPAA?

The acronym, of course, stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, created by Congress in 1996. Its sole purpose is to protect individuals and their medical privacy.

The law is taken seriously. Health-care workers have lost their jobs for divulging medical info that wasn't theirs to share. Establishments associated with them have gotten socked with huge fines for the infractions.

A local nurse who's also a lawyer tells me that Knott's tweets - although astoundingly unprofessional - don't appear to violate HIPAA because patients' names or other identifiable information was not shared.

Medical ethicist Art Caplan disagrees.

"I think she could be looking at legal liability," says Caplan, who directs the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. "If there's enough information in the tweets for others to deduce who's being discussed, that's a clear HIPAA violation."

In this case, "others" include workers at the hospital that employs Knott but who still are not entitled to know medical information that's supposed to be kept confidential by a patient's immediate health-care providers.

Just because, say, a hospital HR employee sees a person wheeled into the ER doesn't mean the HR person is entitled to know that the person fell off a ladder while cleaning gutters in the rain. But the HR person might read a tweet, put two and two together and - voila! - there goes the patient's privacy.

Then there's the wild unkindness of Knott's tweets. Hospitalized people are not at their best. They're half-dressed, feel like crap and are poked and prodded in their most intimate places by fully clothed people privy to their most personal health information. They're terribly vulnerable, deserving of compassion and respect, even if - yes - their own actions may have contributed to their misery.

For Knott to denigrate them, whether naming them or not, is contemptible and, as Caplan says, "Sick people are not supposed to be used for a hospital worker's entertainment."

Like this ditty, tweeted by Knott on June 17, 2013: "My first gun shot wound! #awesome."

I doubt that the victim concurred.

Knott's career is now at risk, as it should be. She belongs nowhere near the sick, whose trust and dignity she violated every time she publicly blabbed about their condition, how they got that way and what she thought about it.

She ought to be fired.

Stat.

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On Twitter: @RonniePhilly

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