Marcele Rojas reports: Southeast resident Cathy Meyer reached her breaking point when she received a fax with a list of patients in Putnam Hospital Center’s psychiatric ward. The fax was from another department within the hospital, she said, seeking the patients’ medical charts. […] For more than a year, Meyer has received dozens of faxes…
Category: Health Data
More recent breaches we didn’t know about
Thanks to the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office for posting breach notices online: Student Loan Xpress, Inc. reported (pdf) that the service provider for their student loans, American Education Services, inadvertently transmitted personal information on student loans to another lender that AES also has contracts with. The information may have included names, addresses, Social Security…
UK: Dental patient fraud pair jailed
A woman and her stepfather have been given jail terms for defrauding nearly £20,000 from patients at two dental practices in Glasgow. Receptionist Adele Ballantyne, 22, copied credit and debit card details and passed them to John Hill, 32, who then ordered goods for resale. Ballantyne was jailed for 12 months and Hill was sentenced…
Congress heard us! (commentary)
I’m first working my way through the provisions in the stimulus bill that relate to breaches and notifications. One of the recommendations that I and other privacy advocates had made was central notification and disclosure on a publicly available web site. They heard us. Here’s part of the new law: (3) NOTICE TO SECRETARY- Notice…
Think globally, act locally — kudos to WTHR
This seems to be my morning for giving thumbs up. This one is to WTHR, whose investigative series on pharmacies dumping unshredded prescription documents and customer data led the government to take action. Their reports had been covered on PogoWasRight.org starting in July 2006 and demonstrate what good local news coverage can accomplish. One aspect…
Electronic Medical Records: Will Your Privacy Be Safe?
Bernadine Healy, M.D. had a commentary in USA Today a few days ago that reiterates some of the concerns privacy advocates have raised. It’s interesting to see how many people from different fields have all cited the Alex Rodriguez case as an example of where someone’s privacy was violated with significant consequences: Look at Alex…