A rash of theft and loss of digital devices has Alberta’s Information and Privacy Commissioner scratching his head. In the past month, there have been seven self reported breaches of personal information, each involving a stolen or lost laptop or digital device. Two of those are government computers and personal information is at risk. Frank…
Category: Health Data
VA data breach statistics for 4th Quarter 2010
Some summary numbers from the Department of Veterans Affairs Quarterly Notice to Congress on Data Breaches for the 4th Quarter 2010: Overall, there were 5,090 notification of data loss letters mailed or pending mailing and 1,552 notification of credit protection letters mailed or pending mailing for the quarter. The bigger incidents that occurred during the…
Private health info faxed dozens of times
Tighter rules for faxing medical documents are needed after a privacy breach last year, Saskatchewan’s privacy commissioner says. Information and privacy commissioner Gary Dickson said Monday that after a Saskatoon medical clinic changed its fax number, another business in town got its old number — and received 60 faxes containing private health information. Read more…
(Update) FL: Woman sentenced for stealing identity to get bigger breast implants
Jon Burstein of the Sun-Sentinel brings us up-to-date on a case of medical identity theft covered previously on this site. A Tamarac woman who broke the law to get bigger breast implants was sentenced Monday morning to two and a half years in federal prison. Shatarka Nuby, 29, pleaded guilty in August to aggravated identity theft and a…
Confidential patient details posted online by NHS East Sussex Downs and Weald
Confidential patient information has been inadvertently posted on a website in an NHS blunder. Patients’ names, dates of birth, NHS numbers and treatment and procedures were inadvertently included in an electronic spreadsheet file which formed part of a response to a Freedom of Information request sent out in May last year. The information was later…
(update) Holy Cross Hospital (FL) breach affected 1500
As a small update to the Holy Cross Hospital breach reported previously on this site: Holy Cross’s report to HHS indicates that 1500 patients were affected by the July 27th theft of paper records. It’s not clear why the hospital took until Dec. 2 to report the incident to HHS as it had publicly revealed…