Stephen Dean reports: State officials said no data was breached after a state worker’s stolen laptop was tracked down to a home on the east side of Indianapolis. A longtime employee with the Indiana Department of Child Services (DCS) told police her state-issued laptop was stolen from the back seat of her car at a…
Category: Health Data
Privacy breach prompts retraction of three papers from the trauma literature
A group of international psychology researchers is retracting three papers in the wake of revelations that they failed to adequately safeguard the identities of the patients who participated in the studies. So far, only one article has been formally retracted. That article, “Combining biofeedback and Narrative Exposure Therapy for persistent pain and PTSD in refugees:…
You’ve got mail: Someone else’s medical test results
Misdirecting e-mail with PHI is bad. Misdirecting it to a reporter, well, that’s just begging for bad press. Carolyn Y. Johnson reports: The first e-mail came at the end of June. It was from a doctor’s office in another state—a large cardiology group. The note listed the name of a test. It listed the full…
Retinal Consultants Medical Group notifies patients after laptop with PHI was stolen from their office
On June 7, Vitreo-Retinal Medical Group, Inc. (dba Retinal Consultants Medical Group) discovered that a laptop computer which was a component of a diagnostic imaging machine, was stolen sometime after the office closed on June 5. The laptop contained unsecured PHI including patient names, dates of birth, gender, race, and OCT (optical coherence tomography) images. In…
Details emerge on Medtronic breach
More details have emerged on the Medtronic breach noted previously on this blog. Christopher Snowbeck reports: In early July, the manufacturer notified patients about a box of training records that had gone missing from a facility in Minnesota, Resman said. Most of the documents and records in the box dated back to 2008 and were…
Dealing with a health data breach: Six safeguard trends
Over on HealthITSecurity.com, Patrick Ouellette has an article on data breach response trends. You can read it here.