Patrick Book reports: The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan is taking a wait-and-see approach on a massive privacy breach. Regina’s Dr. Teik Im Ooi was accused by Saskatchewan’s privacy commissioner Gary Dickson of failing to protect a patients’ privacy after 25 boxes of private records turned up in a recycling bin earlier this…
Category: Health Data
WA: Social Security Numbers of 20,000 Swedish Med. Ctr. employees exposed on the web for 9 weeks
Carol M. Ostrom reports: Swedish Medical Center is alerting nearly 20,000 current and former employees that their personal information — including Social Security numbers — was accidentally made accessible on the Internet for a nine-week period. Read more on Seattle Times. A notice to employees, on an internal page of the medical center’s web site reads: July 20,…
(Follow-up) Doctor named and blamed for patient files found in Regina dumpster; Dickson recommends prosecution
The follow-up on a case of improper records protection/disposal originally uncovered in March, from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Saskatchewan: Saskatchewan’s Information and Privacy Commissioner, Gary Dickson, has issued his Investigation Report H-2011-001 dealing with 180,169 pieces of patient personal health information (PHI) found in a recycling bin in Regina on…
Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust signs undertaking
There was no press release or fanfare, but the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office web site indicates that Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has signed an undertaking with the ICO over the loss of an individual’s medical records. According to the undertaking: The personal data was recognised as missing when the data controller received a subject…
Beth Israel reports potential data breach (update2)
Hiawatha Bray reports: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is notifying more than 2,000 of its patients that some of their personal information may have been stolen from a hospital computer. The hospital said today that an unnamed computer service vendor had failed to restore proper security settings on the computer after performing maintenance on it….
Settlement of yet another lawsuit against WellPoint /Anthem Blue Cross gets preliminary approval
If you feel like you need a scorecard to keep track of lawsuits against WellPoint or settlements involving WellPoint, it’s understandable. WellPoint recently settled a lawsuit by the Indiana Attorney General’s Office over delayed notification following a breach that occurred in 2009 and continued until after a customer notified them twice in 2010. Then they settled…