Tony Kontzer reports: The phenomenon of medical identity theft is on the rise, and healthcare companies face more challenges in addressing the issue than their counterparts in the financial services industry, a panel of experts agreed Thursday at the RSA 2010 conference in San Francisco. The Federal Trade Commission estimates the number of American patients…
Category: Health Data
Patient data stolen from WFUBMC employee’s car
A bag containing a document with the names and Social Security numbers of 554 patients of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center was stolen from an employee’s locked car, medical center officials said today. The theft happened Feb. 15 in the parking deck of an off-campus outpatient clinic, officials said. The list did not include…
Patient data stolen from WFUBMC employee's car
A bag containing a document with the names and Social Security numbers of 554 patients of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center was stolen from an employee’s locked car, medical center officials said today. The theft happened Feb. 15 in the parking deck of an off-campus outpatient clinic, officials said. The list did not include…
Auctioning off patient records
What stops a storage company from auctioning off the contents of abandoned storage units or units that are in arrears when the contents are medical records? Maybe nothing.
Texas behavioral counseling business owner charged with health care fraud
The owner of a Houston, Texas behavioral business was charged on Wednesday with 17 counts for a scheme to defraud Medicaid for more than $1 million, prosecutors announced. Edward Birts, 51, the owner of Courage to Change, is accused of aggravated identity theft for allegedly unlawfully acquiring Medicaid beneficiaries’ information. He used the names, addresses…
File-Sharing Software Potential Threat to Health Privacy
The personal health and financial information stored in thousands of North American home computers may be vulnerable to theft through file-sharing software, according to a research study published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. […] El Emam’s CHEO team used popular file sharing software to gain access to documents they downloaded…