Well, I tried to warn Sutherland Healthcare Solutions that they shouldn’t let their breach dribble out and stay in the news cycle, but they declined to be more transparent. So now we have yet more news about their recent breach that affected more than 168,000 patients of Los Angeles County departments of Health Services and Public Health as well as an as-yet undisclosed number of patients at City of Hope. Now Maura Dolan reports:
Records for nearly 56,000 San Francisco patients, some with Social Security numbers, were stored in computers stolen last month from a medical billing firm in Torrance, said San Francisco’s Department of Public Health on Friday.
“We are working to ensure that all patients are notified and provided with resources to help them protect their privacy,” said Barbara Garcia, San Francisco’s health director.
Most of the San Francisco patients whose records were stolen were uninsured and visited the city’s public health offices, including San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, between August 2012 and November 2013, the department said.
Read more on L.A. Times.
The incident is not yet up on HHS’s public breach tool, which may be the only way we get a full count on how many entities and patients have been affected.
Update 1: San Francisco General Hospital & Trauma Center’s notification letter, issued by the San Francisco Department of Health/San Francisco Health Network, is available online (pdf).