Brian Bandell reports:
Holy Cross Hospital notified 9,900 of its patients that their personal information might have been breached by an employee who may have intended to commit tax fraud.
Patient names, dates of birth, addresses and social security numbers were inappropriately accessed by an employee who has since been terminated, the nonprofit hospital said. This occurred between November 2011 and August 2013.
Read more on South Florida Business Journal. There’s no notice on the hospital’s site at this time and it’s not yet clear how they learned of the breach.
CBS Miami adds an interesting detail:
According to hospital officials, they recently learned that an employee in the Privacy Office had inappropriately accessed thousands of patient records.
Bandell also provides some stats on patient data theft in Florida that are of interest:
Identity theft from health care providers has been near epidemic levels in South Florida, as covered by a Business Journal feature story in April. More than 1.4 million patient records in South Florida have been impacted since 2009, according to federal records. Often, these records are stolen by people looking to commit identity theft or make fraudulent tax refund filings.
And that’s just south Florida and only the cases that have already been detected and reported.