An editorial from the St. Petersburg Times: […] For more than half a year, strangers’ medical records jammed the home fax machine of Hudson resident Elizabeth Reed. The records described patients’ illnesses, lab results and prescription refill requests. The flow of records so disrupted the family’s home phone service that they resorted to using cell…
Category: Health Data
A failure to protect medical privacy
An editorial from the St. Petersburg Times: […] For more than half a year, strangers’ medical records jammed the home fax machine of Hudson resident Elizabeth Reed. The records described patients’ illnesses, lab results and prescription refill requests. The flow of records so disrupted the family’s home phone service that they resorted to using cell…
Former WellPoint employee sentenced
From the Associated Press, news that Angelique Mullings, a WellPoint employee, was sentenced to more than two years in prison for stealing the identities of about 40 health care professionals to buy cell phones: Authorities say Mullings worked for WellPoint, Inc., a licensee of Anthem/Blue Cross and Blue Shield. They said she had access to…
One mystery solved
As I noted in a previous blog entry, I was curious as to why a breach that had originally been listed on OCR’s site involving University of Texas Medical Branch no longer appears on the site. I contacted HHS about the removal of the listing, and they confirmed my hunch: the breach pre-dated the September…
NZ: Hospital sorry for naming patients in reports
Kate Newton reports: Hutt Hospital has apologised to two patients after accidentally including their names and some medical details in public meeting papers. The blunder was discovered after the papers for Tuesday’s Hutt Valley District Health Board meeting had been distributed and the meeting held. The patients’ names were published in a section on serious…
More breaches revealed on OCR’s site
In addition to the breaches that we already know about from the media, I periodically scan OCR’s list of reported breaches to see what we didn’t know about. Here are two other breaches that I posted to PHIprivacy.net, but that also belong here because they involve SSN and not just healthcare information: Pediatric Sports and…