Category: Health Data

Class action lawsuits for medical data breaches are becoming more attractive to lawyers, particularly in California where there are statutory damages for violation of the state’s Confidential Medical Information Act.

Laura Donnelly and James Clayton report: Disclosures under the Freedom of Information Act reveal almost 600 NHS security breaches involving patients’ personal data in four years. The number of incidents each year doubled, from 90 in 2008 to 179 last year, with millons of records involved. Read more on The Telegraph.

They say they have enough insurance to cover data breach costs, but a new filing by SAIC reveals that OCR has opened an investigation into the breach incident where unencrypted data were stolen from an employee’s unattended vehicle.

Gotta watch those vendors – even the well-intentioned ones.  Robert Weisman provides an update on an incident mentioned previously on this blog: St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center said Friday it is notifying 6,831 patients that their billing information, including credit card numbers and security codes, may have been compromised when documents the hospital planned to shred…

Ugh. Tons of data acquired by hackers, including 25,000 Social Security numbers.  All told, they’re now reporting that almost 182,000 people (including children) had their PHI stolen.  See today’s story in the Salt Lake Tribune.

Steven Harmon reports: In a puzzling breach of security, computer storage devices containing identification information of 800,000 Californians using the state’s child support services have gone missing. The Department of Child Support Service reported on Thursday the data devices were lost March 12 en route to California from the Colorado facilities of IBM, one of…