A volunteer at the James A. Haley Veterans Hospital has been accused of stealing patients’ identities and using that information to file fake income tax refunds of about $550,000, according to federal court documents. Ricardo Jacinto Rodriguez, the VA volunteer, and Andropolis Jioberiti Mitchell were indicted last week on charges of embezzlement and fraud. The…
Category: Health Data
Surgery photo leads to privacy lawsuit against Torrance Memorial
Chad Terhune reports: During surgery at Torrance Memorial Medical Center, an anesthesiologist decorated a patient’s face with stickers while the patient was unconscious — giving her a black mustache and teardrops under her left eye — and then a nurse’s aide snapped her photo. The 2011 incident has prompted a state investigation and a civil…
Medical University of South Carolina notifies patients of breach at credit card processing vendor
The Summerville Journal Scene reports: MUSC says it has had its financial records hacked and credit card information for some 7,000 people has been compromised, according to area reports. At some point between June 30 and August 21, the records of Blackhawk Consulting Group were compromised and hackers got the credit card information for patients…
GA: Nurse sentenced in ID theft for tax refund fraud case
There’s a follow-up to a breach reported previously on this blog. Melody Milton, 38, of Albany, Georgia, was sentenced on August 12, 2013, following her guilty pleas on August 23, 2012. Milton was a home health care nurse employed by Phoebe Putney Home Health Care.
Austereo confirms it made four calls to royal prank hospital seeking permission to air call
Holly Byrnes reports: The London nurse who took her own life after being pranked by Austereo for royal baby news is believed to have kept secret more phone calls from the radio network in the days before her suicide. While details of the hoax call made to Saldanha in December 2012 made headline news around…
St. Anthony's doctor's laptop stolen with patient information
Blythe Berhard reports a laptop computer and flash drive containing information on 2,600 St. Anthony’s nursing home patients was stolen from a doctor’s car on July 29. The computer included patient names and birth dates and may have contained medical records. It did not hold social security numbers or any financial information, according to the…