One of yesterday’s posts on PHIprivacy.net reports a data breach involving Kelsey-Seybold Clinic that has not been reported in the mainstream media. I contacted Kelsey-Seybold after a site visitor alerted me to the breach. The report is frustratingly short on details, though, because Kelsey-Seybold could — and did — simply ignore questions it did not to want to answer. Perhaps they provided their patients with a fuller disclosure, and I hope they did, but the contrast between their approach to voluntary public disclosure and that of Johns Hopkins Hospital is striking.
Thankfully, when the HITECH Act provisions incorporated in Public Law 111-5 (ARRA) go into effect, entities who have stonewalled reporters or bloggers or who otherwise try to keep breaches out of the media will probably have to rethink their public relations and disclosure approach. Although not all breaches involving personal health information (PHI) will have to be publicly disclosed, many more will, and the notice and notification provisions in the law include both publishing a notice in prominent media outlets and notifying the federal government who will post the breach on a public web site maintained by Health & Human Services (HHS).
Under the contents of notification provisions of HITECH, we still won’t necessarily know how many patients were affected in any particular breach (other than it affected 500 or more), and it is not clear to me whether saying a “laptop was stolen was from an employee” would suffice for the brief description of if the entity would have to include the location of the theft (from the office, vehicle, home, etc.), but I am hopeful that we will get more information than we have gotten to date.
The breach notification requirements under the HITECH Act go into effect 30 days after the date that interim final regulations are promulgated, which was to be no later than 180 days after the date of enactment of the law in February. If HHS does publish the regulations by August 16, 2009, the breach notification obligations should go into effect mid-September. Maybe I’ll post a countdown clock on the site so that I have something to look forward to.