One question that occasionally pops up is how often businesses go out of business after or due to a data breach. My answer to that is “not often,” but we do it occasionally. In some cases, the breach may just have been a final straw for an already shaky business. Yesterday, during a webinar with…
Category: Health Data
Virginia Hospital Must Answer for Snooping Employees’ Privacy Breach
From Bloomberg Law: A Virginia health-care system will have to answer claims that it is liable for its employees’ snooping into a patient’s confidential health information. A Virginia trial court shouldn’t have dismissed Lindsey Parker’s complaint alleging Carilion Healthcare Corp. and Carilion Clinic should be held liable for their employees’ wrongdoing, the Virginia Supreme Court…
Third of US data breaches happen in hospitals
Anthony Spadafora reports: After a recent series of aggressive phishing attacks on NHSmail, cyber security provider Cofense has compiled a new report using shared US client data to reveal how much of a danger future phishing attacks could become in the UK. The report, entitled Say Ah: A Closer Look at Phishing in the Healthcare…
Is Your e-PHI Secure? ONC and OCR Update HIPAA Security Risk Assessment Tool
Valerie K. Jackson of Jackson Lewis writes: October 2018 marks the 15th annual National Cyber Security Awareness Month. In honor of this occasion, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have jointly launched an updated HIPAA Security Risk Assessment (SRA) Tool to help covered entities and…
Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services notifies 10,400 whose data improperly retained by contractor
JEFFERSON CITY, MO – On October 24, 2018, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (“Department”) mailed over 10,400 letters to individuals informing them that the Department recently discovered a breach of security of their personal information. The breach occurred because, sometime before September 30, 2016, an information technology contractor for the State of…
178 Albertans notified about privacy breach by former Alberta Health Services employee
Michael Franklin reports: The AHS has informed a group of Albertans that details about their health records, that were supposed to remain private, were recently accessed by a former AHS employee. The agency says it notified the affected individuals on Wednesday. The inappropriate access took place between February and July of this year at Calgary’s…