In the justice system: Following up on a story here: former State Department employee Dwayne F. Cross was sentenced to 12 months of probation and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service for illegally accessing more than 150 confidential passport application files. More. Identity theft to obtain medical services is not new, but now…
Category: Health Data
Mass. General paperwork for 66 patients lost on Red Line train
Milton J. Valencia reports that documents containing the personal medical information of at least 66 patients at Massachusetts General Hospital was lost this month when an employee apparently left them on an MBTA train. The lost billing records contained names, dates of birth, and medical information such as diagnoses and the name of the provider…
LifeWatch notifies patients of exposed data
LifeWatch Corp., a company specializing in ambulatory health monitoring, has notified (pdf) the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office that due to a configuration error, some patient files were available on public areas of their web site for about three weeks last month. Personal information in the exposed files included the patients’ names, dates of birth,…
UK: ICO takes action against Camden PCT for data blunder
From the Information Commissioner’s Office: The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has taken enforcement action against Camden Primary Care Trust (PCT) following a breach of the Data Protection Act. Computers containing 2,500 individuals’ names, addresses and medical diagnoses were left beside a skip inside the grounds of St. Pancras Hospital in August 2008. The computers, which…
UK: Computer with patient details stolen from Whipps Cross
The Waltham Forest Guardian reports that Whipps Cross University Hospital has confirmed that a computer stolen from the premises on February 22nd contained the details of as many as 550 patients, including name, date of birth, treatment information and diagnosis.
Jackson Memorial Hospital statement on data theft
John Dorschner of the Miami Herald reports that personal information of more than 200,000 visitors to Jackson Memorial Hospital between May 2007 and March 2008 was on a hard drive that was stolen from the hospital’s mainframe data center on or before February 11. According to the hospital’s CIO, no Social Security numbers or financial…