Regulators have logged dozens, even hundreds, of complaints against some health providers for violating federal patient privacy law. Warnings are doled out privately, but sanctions are imposed only rarely. Companies say they take privacy seriously.
This story was co-published with NPR’s Shots blog.
When CVS Health customers complained to the company about privacy violations, some of the calls and letters made their way to Joseph Fenity. One patient’s medication was delivered to his neighbor, revealing he had cancer. Another was upset because a pharmacist had yelled personal information across the counter.
Fenity worked on a small team that dealt with complaints directed to the company president’s office, assuring customers their situations were rare. “I sincerely apologize on behalf of CVS Health,” Fenity says he’d respond. “This is not how we handle things. The breach of your protected health information was an isolated incident and we’ll do better.”
In fact, Fenity learned — partly from battling CVS over the privacy of his own medical information — that was “a lie.”
CVS is among hundreds of health providers nationwide that repeatedly violated the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA between 2011 and 2014, a ProPublica analysis of federal data shows. Other well-known repeat offenders include the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Walgreens, Kaiser Permanente and Walmart.
And yet, the agency tasked with enforcing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act took no punitive action against these providers, ProPublica found.
Read more on ProPublica. They have also launched a HIPAA Helper to search for repeat offenders as reported by three agencies. Of note, many of these reports you will never have seen before because they involve less than 500 patients.
ProPublica’s report basically confirms what I’ve been reporting all along: that there are too many repeat offenders who never suffer any serious penalties or consequences. As I’ve reported previously, the CDPH is much more likely to fine entities for privacy breaches than HHS, but even CDPH penalizes only a tiny fraction of all the complaints they receive.
One point of especial interest to me in the report was whether OCR considers an entity’s history of past breaches. When OCR was investigating WellPoint, I contacted them and asked whether they were considering the fact that WellPoint had had an almost identical breach previously that had gone undetected for more than one year and that involved what I had estimated to be about 2 million insurance records of over 125,000 members. OCR was not aware of that breach, because the first breach was prior to HITECH going into effect in September, 2009. So OCR does not seem to take the whole history, which is a shame.