Last week I posted links to a controversy as to whether Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Arkansas had actually experienced a privacy breach or not. The story just gets weirder and weirder. The medical center released the following press release, available on FierceHealthcare, but not, apparently on their web site or on the site of Capella Health. It says, in part:
“It is important for the community to know that while we were able to find approximately 250 pages of health-related papers along Interstate-40 near Forest City, only two pages involved patients from Saint Mary’s. The rest of the pages recovered appear to be from a 3-ring binder related to diabetes education not associated with Saint Mary’s. However, our priority is to determine how any patient information was able to leave our hospital premises.
“We want to stress that the incident appears to be much more limited in scope than seemed at first.”
The medical center was delayed in locating the papers because the trucker had seemingly provided inaccurate information. When the trucker called back the next day to provide an accurate location, hospital personnel were able to retrieve papers:
However, the hospital learned later that the Shred-it employee was unable to retrieve all of the documents because a reporter for KTHV-TV had taken the original documents that we had been told had been secured to the sign post. The reporter also told Saint Mary’s he was in possession of another paper that bore the name of a physician, therapist and patient NOT associated with Saint Mary’s. The reporter was informed that possession of federally protected PHI is unlawful and that the information should be handed over to the health care provider or destroyed immediately.
Well, I doubt that the reporter violated any federal law. HIPAA is binding on covered entities, not those who come into possession of unsecured PHI and who are not, themselves, covered by the law. While it’s not a good idea for unsecured PHI to be floating around a newsroom, I doubt if any laws were broken.
Between 200 and 300 pages were found in the search and clean-up. With the exception of the three documents in the reporter’s possession, every page was part of two three-ring diabetes education binders not associated with Saint Mary’s.
Read more on FierceHealthcare.