Omar Villafranca reports that a winning $60 storage unit auction bid yielded personal and medical information on hundreds of people: But the storage unit also had boxes of sensitive information, including copies of drivers licenses and Social Security cards, credit union reports and financial reports. The letters were addressed to a closed-down nursing facility. The…
Category: Health Data
Ca: Vets ombudsman asks for privacy probe after personal information accessed
Murray Brewster reports: Canada’s Veteran’s ombudsman says he’s asking the country’s privacy watchdog to investigate why his Veterans Affairs file was access hundreds of times. Pat Stogran says he believes private information in those records may have been inappropriately used, much like what happened to another outspoken critic of the department. Sean Bruyea, who prior…
Update: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center breach
Anemona Hartocollis of the New York Times answers one of the questions I had about the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center breach. Citing a hospital spokesperson, she writes: The mistake was found in early July, after a relative of a patient found information from that patient on the Internet and told the hospital about it. The…
Information for Thousands of Columbia University Medical Center Patients on Internet (updated)
MyFoxNY reports: Personal information — including names and some clinical data — of thousands of patients at Columbia University Medical Center ended up freely visible on the Internet, Columbia and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital have confirmed. The information on 6,800 patients was “inadvertently” placed on a server, hospital officials reported. But whose server? Were the data posted to one of…
Update on Saint Mary's Regional Medical Center breach allegations
Last week I posted links to a controversy as to whether Saint Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Arkansas had actually experienced a privacy breach or not. The story just gets weirder and weirder. The medical center released the following press release, available on FierceHealthcare, but not, apparently on their web site or on the site…
Lessons From A Security Breach
Ed Sperling writes: In late July Kern Medical Center’s information system came to a grinding halt. The hospital believed it had the standard security systems in place to protect its medical records. But for 16 long days that stretched into August, the hospital struggled to get its systems operational and isolate the problem from its…