From Courthouse News:
Texas has sued fired Medicaid claims administrator Xerox for the second time in four months, claiming its failure to return client medical records exposes the state to massive federal fines for violations of privacy.
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission sued Xerox State Healthcare in Travis County Court on Tuesday.
The commission claims that on July 31, Xerox employees removed company laptops and 244 boxes of documents from its offices after the state terminated the parties’ agreement and sued.
The commission believes the information includes client names, photographs, birthdates, medical and billing records.
Read more on Courthouse News.
h/t, Joe Cadillic
Update: The state’s press release can be found here. PHIprivacy.net has emailed Xerox for a statement and will either update this entry or create a new one if and when more information becomes available.
Update 2: Xerox provided PHIprivacy.net with the following statement:
On August 1, Xerox completed the transition of the State of Texas’ Medicaid contract to a new vendor. This transition was accomplished with complete transparency and with the full knowledge and participation of the Health and Human Services Commission. The retention of property includes Xerox material such as computer monitors, televisions, human resource files, internal financial records and Xerox branded collateral and posters, while the data represents proprietary Xerox information and was retained with the State’s knowledge who declined repeated opportunities to review the material. Last month, Xerox asked the Travis County District Court to rule on our retention of this information and a court date is set for next month.
The Xerox spokesperson also kindly provided a copy of the motion they filed last month in Travis County Court, which I have uploaded here (pdf).
You get a somewhat different impression when you get both sides of the story, don’t you?