Carly Harrington reports:
Documents containing health information of about 750 Summit Medical Group patients was stolen from an employee’s vehicle earlier this month.
The records including patient names and diagnoses were taken Sept. 4 when a case containing information about certain Summit patients’ hospital discharges from December 2010 through August 2011 was among items stolen while an employee’s car was parked at the employee’s home.
Summit spokeswoman Jennifer Lawson said no patient Social Security numbers, home addresses or financial information were included in the documents.
The information, which did include Summit account numbers, dates of birth, primary physician’s names, names of hospitals and dates of discharges, pertained to those who see Knox County physicians at Emory Family Practice, Summit Medical Group at Deane Hill and Northshore Drive, Fountain City Family Physicians and Dr. Kenneth Reese.
Read more on KnoxvilleBiz.com.
Color me militant, but I would really like to see HHS and/or states’ attorney generals start issuing fines over laptops left in cars. It seems clear that despite the media coverage of such breaches, they continue to occur with alarming regularity. Maybe if businesses had to start paying hefty fines on top of the costs of mitigating any harm, notifications, etc., they’d get more serious about ensuring that unencrypted data aren’t leaving the building and certainly aren’t being left in unattended vehicles.
CORRECTION TO ABOVE: My apologies to Summit Medical Group. This was NOT a stolen laptop case. These were paper records.
Odd you don’t care about copyright violations and plagarism too
There’s no plagiarism at all. I offered my own comments after quoting from – and appropriately crediting – a published source. The quoted material was necessary to demonstrate the scope of the breach and the details that led to my comments. As far as I know, this all falls within Fair Use doctrine and First Amendment protections.
Now, since you’ve seen fit to attack the blog without forthrightly disclosing that you are posting from an IP assigned to Summit Medical Group, I’d suggest you spend less time worrying about copyright law and more time improving security.