Melynda Sides reports:
A 26-year-old woman from Alabaster has been charged with stealing information from thousands of patients at Trinity Medical Center in Birmingham.
Tuesday, a federal grand jury indicted Chelsea Catherine Stewart for stealing identifying information from more than 4,000 patients, possessing stolen mail, attempting to commit bank fraud, misusing a Social Security number and aggravated identity theft, according to U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance.
Stewart was arrested in early June for a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as well as wrongfully obtaining individual health information from Trinity.
Read more on MyFoxAL.com
Is this the first we’ve heard about this? This happened in March. How did the hospital not miss hundred of pages of medical records? Are their files that easy to steal?
Did you read the previous coverage at http://www.phiprivacy.net/?p=6791? The records were stolen between March 22 and April 1 and discovered (and recovered) on April 8. The USPS discovered the records during one of their investigations. I think there’s a legitimate question of whether the hospital had any clue that records had been stolen before they were notified of their discovery in the woman’s house.