“Do you really think that the authorities handled this matter properly?”
No way, the authorities screwed up big time. The lady that poured the drink out was wrong. The hospital or whoever was snooping in her Ftaher’s records were wrong and criminal by itself. And the authorities that are pushing this is wrong, wrong, wrong. No dispute with me.
We don't know whether the woman damaged the cash register -- and some of those suckers are expensive. She's only charged with 'disturbance,' which suggests to me that she didn't cause a great deal of property damage.
I'll bet there was a lot more to this than the woman reports to the paper; I can't imagine a U.S. Attorney's office charging her if the incident happened just as she said.
I smell a bit of a grandstander here in the woman's comments about how SHE shouldn't have been treated this way because it HER FATHER was a veteran.
We don't know all of the facts, but this almost certainly was not a HIPAA violation and was not 'criminal,' if you are using that word technically (sometimes the word is used simply to mean egregious and I don't know how you're using it).
First, use of the father's medical records for internal security purposes by the hospital is not a "disclosure" of protected health information unless the hospital disclosed it to an outside party in a manner that does not meet an exception to HIPAA.
Second, HIPAA contains an exception for disclosures for law enforcement purposes.
HIPAA, contrary to common belief, is not a strong healthcare privacy statute. State privacy laws, both general and healthcare-specific, and other federal laws are the main protections against invasion of privacy regarding your health information.