Author: Dissent

Brian Stanley reports: It’s said to know who you really are, you should look into your heart. But police say one man used someone else’s identity while undergoing heart surgery and left a mentally disabled man on the hook for $350,000 in medical costs. Full story – The Herald News

Michelle Laczkoski reports in the Milford Daily News: Calling it the “most outrageous, untenable cases to ever come across (his) desk,” Worcester Superior Court Judge John McCann today sentenced a 55-year-old former Milford woman to five to seven years in prison for her role in an elaborate identify theft case. Charlotte A. Boehm pleaded guilty…

The AP is reporting two arrests involving theft of personal and medical information from 6 Alzheimer’s patients at an unnamed Buford nursing home.  The patients became victims of identity fraud.  One of those arrested, Iniabel Ferrer, worked at the nursing home.

Reprinted from REPORT ON PATIENT PRIVACY, the industry’s most practical source of news on HIPAA patient privacy provisions. For the first time, a covered entity (CE) under the privacy and security rules has made a $100,000 payment to Uncle Sam and agreed to subject itself to three years of monitoring by HHS for losing unencrypted…

AP reports: A Bloomington doctor who dumped patients’ sensitive medical records into the trash has been fined $1,250 by state officials. Dr. J.B. O’Donnell agreed to the fines and promised to post information about the possible security breach on his Web site for 30 days. […] The records contained patients’ names, addresses, birth dates, Social…

[…] Because there are no laws that directly protect a user’s online health information, all of the vendors who sell weight scales and/or blood glucose and pressure monitors that can send data directly to services like HealthVault set their own privacy policies, which means some will be weaker than others. “There isn’t anyone to regulate…