Jordan Robertson of Bloomberg reports: The three big U.S. credit-reporting agencies have agreed to be more helpful. Errors in your credit history will now be easier to correct and delinquent medical bills will take longer to hurt your credit score. An agreement announced Monday between New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion will limit the…
Month: March 2015
ANNOUNCE: Change your bookmarks and RSS Feed
In 2008, I spun off PHIprivacy.net from PogoWasRight.org to start reporting on all the breaches and medical privacy issues of concern to me. The following year, I spun off DataBreaches.net from PogoWasRight.org to cover all non-healthcare sector breaches. It’s time to re-merge. Three blogs are just too much to keep running. But don’t worry: you’ll…
Indiana State Medical Association discloses theft of backup drives with 39,090 members’ health insurance information
A statement from ISMA: The Indiana State Medical Association (ISMA) experienced the theft of two archive backup hard drives on Feb. 13, 2015. The equipment stored the ISMA group health and life insurance databases, which contained information on 39,090 insureds. This was a random criminal act that occurred while an ISMA employee was transporting the…
Valley Community Healthcare notifies patients after laptop with their information was stolen
Valley Community Healthcare in California is notifying some patients who underwent cardiogram testing. In a letter dated March 9, Paul Wilson, President/CEO and Roger A. Meeks, M.D., Chief Medical Officer, informed patients: On February 24, 2015 we discovered that a laptop computer attached to the Electrocardiogram (EKG) machine in the General Medicine department was missing. The…
Sonoma County social worker sued for snooping in applicant’s files
Sometimes employees snoop in healthcare or government databases just out of curiosity. Other times, they snoop to obtain information to misuse. That misuse could involve financial fraud such as tax refund fraud, or it could involve tormenting your neighbor, according to a lawsuit in Santa Rosa, California. Paul Payne of the Press Democrat reported on a case…
Tort of intrusion upon seclusion and breaches of personal health information: the Court of Appeal decision in Hopkins v. Kay
Analysis of Hopkins v. Kay, this by Bradley J. Freedman, Barry Glaspell and Patrick Hawkins of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP: … In Hopkins v. Kay, a patient of a hospital, on her own behalf and that of other patients in the “class” proposed to be certified by the court, alleged that her hospital records had been accessed by…