There was some great reporting by Jordan Robertson of Bloomberg while I was away: Hospitals in the U.S. pledge to keep a patient’s health background confidential. Yet states from Washington to New York are putting privacy at risk by selling records that can be used to link a person’s identity to medical conditions using public information. Consider Ray Boylston,…
Category: Health Data
Ignorance + faulty assumptions + trust = breach
Apparently there are still clinicians out there who never heard of encryption and whose patient or client data may wind up on re-sold hard drives, as this social worker discovered the hard way. This breach doesn’t speak well for Other World Computing, either. Thankfully, the drive with PHI was acquired by someone who understood the…
Ca: Patients’ medical info left on City bus
Michele Young reports: His 80-year-old mother’s medical records were left on a City bus and Darrel Davy isn’t satisfied with Interior Health’s explanation. Davy said Thursday his mother was admitted to Royal Inland Hospital on May 23 and released three days later. She’s feeling better, but he’s been upset since she got a registered letter…
Moore Medical Center Records Safe Despite Tornado Damage
Several weeks ago, I blogged that I hoped Moore Medical Center in Oklahoma had its patient records backed up off-site. I was happy to read this week that they did. Clearly, patient care and availability of records is critical. But I wouldn’t go as far as Jeff Drummond did and declare that they “didn’t lose…
VA Systems Hacked From Abroad
Eric Chabrow reports: Since 2010, hackers from other nations, including China and perhaps Russia, have repeatedly breached Department of Veterans Affairs computers containing unencrypted data on some 20 million veterans, the chairman of a House panel said at a June 4 hearing. In at least one incident, hackers encrypted the unencrypted VA data, making it impossible for…
Patients details left abandoned in Stockport as ICO highlights need for better decommissioning practices
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has imposed a monetary penalty of £100,000 after the discovery of a large number of patient records at a site formerly owned by Stockport Primary Care Trust. The information was uncovered when the site was bought in 2011 and the new owner reported that boxes of waste containing personal information had been…