The Stanford Hospital breach is a useful reminder of why you shouldn’t use real data sets for testing. Kevin Sack of the New York Times reports: Private medical data for nearly 20,000 emergency room patients at California’s prestigious Stanford Hospital were exposed to public view for nearly a year because a billing contractor’s marketing agent sent the…
Category: Health Data
UK: Stolen laptops contained some health information
Many entities that are not primarily healthcare entities collect and store health information. Sadly, all too many of them do not adequately protect such data. From the Information Commissioner’s Office today: Two organisations have taken action after they breached the Data Protection Act by failing to encrypt personal information on laptops that were later stolen,…
Brooke Mueller sues rehab clinic; alleges employee sent info to media
She had indicated her intention to sue back in February 2010, and I’m somewhat surprised it took so long, but now Brooke Mueller has filed a lawsuit against The Canyon rehab facility for privacy violations. TMZ reports that the lawsuit alleges the facility sold her confidential information to the media: TMZ broke the story after the…
UK: 10,000 archived records destroyed in hospital data blunder, diaries stolen from nurse's car
Dartford and Gravesham NHS Trust breached the Data Protection Act by accidentally destroying 10,000 archived records, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said today. The records – which should have been kept in a dedicated storage area – were put in a disposal room due to lack of space. The records were then mistakenly removed from…
Class action lawsuit filed against Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Multi-Specialty Collection Services
Sue Dremman reports that a lawsuit has been filed against Stanford Hospital & Clinics and its former vendor, Multi-Specialty Collection Services, LLC. You can read about it on Palo Alto Online. This is one of those cases where I really do view a breached entity as a victim because SHC seems to have done everything…
CO: Sensitive Patient Records Found Scattered At Shopping Center
Don Champion reports: An Aurora street sweeper found hundreds of sensitive dental patient records scattered near a Dumpster behind an Aurora shopping center on Saturday. The billings records contained patients’ Social Security numbers, birth dates, names and addresses — information that could be abused by identity thieves. […] The documents trace back to Dentistry at…