Category: Health Data

You can warn and warn employees about not opening email attachments, but despite your best efforts, they do. And to make matters worse, you were storing Social Security numbers and they weren’t encrypted?  The University of Washington Medicine posted this announcement on their site yesterday: November 27, 2013 Seattle — In early October 2013, a…

The latest updates to a case this blog has been following: The FTC has responded to LabMD’s motion for a protective order to quash numerous subpoenas for discovery and to dismiss the complaint with prejudice. On the matter of the protective order, the court granted in part and denied in part, and denied the request…

Understanding what your insurance will cover when it comes to a data breach and what it won’t can save you a lot of grief down the road. Roberta D. Anderson of K&L Gates analyzes a recent case where the court concluded that a breached entity was covered under the terms of their policy’s language, but…

I was just reading news story about a breach in Maryland, and was surprised to learn that the Maryland Attorney General’s Office had charged two health care entities with improper disposal of records and that both cases had settled over the summer. Here’s the press release from August 27, 2013: Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler…

Josh Salmon reports: A physicians group with offices throughout Southwest Florida has notified 4,400 patients that their protected health information may have been breached. An employee at Florida Digestive Health Specialists LLP improperly accessed and photographed some personal patient records that included names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and telephone numbers, according to the…

I wish I had a dollar for every mailing error where someone’s Social Security number was exposed in the envelope window or embedded in the mailing address – or where one person’s statement got combined with another person’s in the same envelope. But those kind of mailing errors are nothing compared to a mailing error…