An Iowa emergency room doctor and medical resident, who violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) by viewing the medical records of multiple women who were not his patients, was sentenced today to a month in jail. Dr. Gabriel Alejandro Hernandez-Roman, age 31, from Isla Verde, Puerto Rico, received the term of incarceration after a June 28, 2024, guilty plea to one count of wrongfully obtaining individually identifiable health information relating to an individual under false pretenses. At his plea and sentencing hearings, Dr. Hernandez-Roman admitted that, between 2020 and 2022, he knowingly and without authorization obtained the protected health information of multiple women at hospitals in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. Dr. Hernandez-Roman was working as a resident doctor in Iowa emergency rooms at the time, including at “Hospital-1” in Cedar Rapids and “Hospital-2” in Iowa City.
