The recent TRICARE/SAIC breach involved the theft of tapes that were en route to being converted/encrypted. Here’s another case where older-formatted files sent out for conversion have been involved in data loss, although in this case, the data were not stolen from an employee’s car but were lost by a delivery service. And while the…
Category: Health Data
Mills-Peninsula Medical Center employee who took records home to be charged with embezzlement and forgery
An update on the Mills-Peninsula Medical Center breach reported in August. The incident was subsequently reported to HHS by Mills-Peninsula Health Services as affecting 1,438 patients. Today, Michelle Durand reports: A former hospital mailroom employee who took home and kept approximately 1,500 patient records will appear in court Monday on charges of embezzlement and forgery….
Former UPMC Shadyside employee sentenced – sort of
Here’s a follow-up on a breach previously reported. Today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports: Paul C. Pepala, 35, of Monroeville, was sentenced Thursday to one year of probation for disclosing to others information from the files of 19 UPMC Shadyside patients. Mr. Pepala, a Zambian man who is a permanent resident of the U.S., was working as…
Training Proposed After TRICARE Breach
Howard Anderson writes: The Department of Defense and two other government agencies have issued a proposed rule designed to help ensure that government contractors provide adequate privacy training to their staff members. The proposal comes in the wake of a recent healthcare information breach incident involving a contractor to TRICARE, the military health program. Read more on GovInfoSecurity. As an…
FBI Probes Sale Of Hospital Patient Information
More on the breach of Florida Hospital patient records by three employees who may have been selling accident victim data to an attorney referral service: WESH in Orlando reports that the FBI is now involved in the case. In related coverage, WFTV reports that “former patients were later solicited by lawyers and funeral homes. In one…
Exploiting Privacy Breaches
Cross-posted from PogoWasRight.org: I recently commented on the rush to class action lawsuits that seems to have become the norm. Today, I was interested to see this column by John Halamka, MD, CIO, CareGroup Health System, Harvard Medical School. He writes, in part: As with any profession there are those attorneys who use the law for personal…