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Thousands of veterans notified after their information was left in a ladies' restroom

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Dissent

The South Carolina VA incident wasn’t the only large incident the Veterans Administration reported to Congress for July. In a separate incident, a folder containing multiple patients’ information including full names, SSN’s, and other medical information was found in a ladies restroom in the main lobby of the medical center in Albuquerque, New Mexico on July 30.

There was evidence to suggest the folder belonged to one of the release of information (ROI) clerks. The documents were believed to have been left in the restroom for less than two hours by an employee who had taken them for a meeting with Human Resources and union officials.

“It appears that the document containing the patient names and SSNs was printed to show the employee’s workload. The majority of the names and SSNs were on this ROI workload report. The report columns on the listing were: patient name, SSN, first or third party request, and status of request. Approximately 80 ROI request forms were also in the folder, which contain the patient name, date of birth, SSN, and what information was being requested, which could be clinical information,” the report states.

On further review, the Data Breach Core Team determined that since the information was left unattended in a public area of the Medical Center for approximately two hours during the work day, that there was a risk of data breach. All Veterans whose SSNs were disclosed in the file were offered credit protection services. After deleting duplicates, 2,670 Veterans were offered credit monitoring services.

The VA determined that this was a reportable breach under HITECH, so we should see it on HHS’s public breach tool at some point.

Updated: The full name of the VA center is the Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center. On September 15, 2014, KRWG reported the story and noted that the employee involved had voluntarily resigned from the VA. KOAT has also reported on the story this weekend, and includes a statement from a recipient of a breach notification letter. 


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