Attorney General William Sorrell filed a complaint and proposed settlement Friday with Health Net, Inc., and Health Net of the Northeast, Inc., regarding the health insurance company’s loss of an unencrypted portable hard drive containing protected health information. The complaint alleges violations of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), Vermont’s Security Breach Notice Act, and…
Category: Health Data
Nurse Fired for Snooping in Tiger Woods' Records Files Defamation Suit
David Rothenberg was the charge nurse on duty at Health Central Hospital in Ocoee on Nov. 27, 2009, as paramedics wheeled in Tiger Woods. The golfer had just crashed his Cadillac Escalade into a tree and fire hydrant outside his Isleworth home. According to Rothenberg, within hours of Woods’s arrival, someone inside the hospital improperly…
Vermont Attorney General Settles Security Breach Allegations Against Health Net
Attorney General William Sorrell filed a complaint and proposed settlement Friday with Health Net, Inc., and Health Net of the Northeast, Inc., regarding the health insurance company’s loss of an unencrypted portable hard drive containing protected health information. The complaint alleges violations of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), Vermont’s Security Breach Notice Act, and…
(follow-up) Junior doctor's stolen laptop: files had been emailed
Following up on the Hull Royal Infirmary and Castle Hill Hospital incident: Dan Raywood quotes a hospital spokesperson who indicates that the doctor had emailed the data to himself. It seems that while the hospital had controls in place to prevent downloading data, its controls to prevent emailing data were not adequate to prevent this…
Ingenix discovers it may have been exposing health service providers’ SSNs for up to 5 years
This is one of those breaches where I really don’t blame the company, which in this case is Minnesota-based Ingenix. Ingenix provides web-based lookups so that patients can find providers in their area covered by their health plan. The provider data Ingenix uses is provided by the health plans or preferred provider plans themselves. Ingenix…
Abbott Medical Optics reports backup tapes with Baylor patients' info stolen
Baylor College of Medicine Department of Ophthalmology has been notified by Abbott Medical Optics that certain backup tapes of information from equipment utilized by the department of Ophthalmology were taken from AMO’s Malpitas, California location. AMO representatives reported that they do not know who took the backup tapes or when they were taken. The information…