Liz Austin Peterson of the Houston Chronicle reports: Confidential medical information for about 1,200 Harris County Hospital District patients may have been compromised when an electronic device used to store the data was lost or stolen, district officials said Wednesday. An employee transferred the information onto the device in order to complete a project away…
Author: Dissent
More UCLA Medical Center employees peeked at celebrities' records, state says
Charles Ornstein reports in the LA Times: […] The California Department of Public Health also found that nearly twice as many medical center employees as had previously been reported peeked at confidential medical records at UCLA. Nearly 60 additional employees gained improper access to records between January 2004 and June 2006, the report said, bringing…
Comments of the World Privacy Forum to the FTC re: Ingenix and Milliman FCRA enforcement action
Some recent articles about the sale of patients’ prescription histories to insurance companies have raised many consumer questions about this practice. Ingenix and Milliman — two companies engaged in this practice — were the subject of a Federal Trade Commission enforcement action which was published for comment in September 2007. The World Privacy Forum provided…
Prescription Data Used To Assess Consumers
Ellen Nakashima reports in the Washington Post: Health and life insurance companies have access to a powerful new tool for evaluating whether to cover individual consumers: a health “credit report” drawn from databases containing prescription drug records on more than 200 million Americans. […] Traditionally, insurance companies have judged an applicant’s risk by gathering medical…
UK: Patient files found in corridor
Confidential patient files have been left lying in a corridor at St George’s Hospital in south London. The files were found by a BBC London reporter on Thursday after a tip-off. The find comes months after six laptops containing information about 20,000 patients were stolen from a locked cabinet at the same hospital. St George’s…
New Privacy Risk: Patients Who Assume Someone Else's Identity to Obtain Treatment
Reprinted from REPORT ON PATIENT PRIVACY, the industry’s most practical source of news on HIPAA patient privacy provisions. A new gray cloud has arrived on the privacy officer’s skyline and it promises to be as vexing as figuring out the privacy rule was back in 2002: patients who assume the identity of another person in…