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…
Author: Dissent
Doctor fined for dumping patients' files in trash (follow-up)
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…
Who's Keeping an Eye on Your Online Health Records?
[…] 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…
Lost tape holds credit data (follow-up)
The BNY Mellon breach apparently affected patient account info, as well. The incident occurred in April, and letters first went out this month. Eileen Smith of the Courier-Post reports: People who have made payments to the University of Pennsylvania Health System have been notified that tapes containing personal information about their accounts have gone missing….
Nurses posts brain surgery pictures on Facebook
Jessica Salter reports in the Telegraph: Her job at a hospital in Stockholm is now at risk after she put 14 photos from a brain surgery and a back operation to her account on the popular social networking site. One showed the operating assistant holding indeterminate parts of the patient’s body. The chief of neurosurgery…
Medical privacy law fails to stop snooping
Clark Kauffman has an article in the Des Moines Register about medical snooping and HIPAA violations in Iowa that makes for an interesting, if unsurprising, read: When Jill went to her doctor two years ago for an operation on her uterus, she didn’t expect that details of her problem would later appear in the hometown…