Category: Health Data

After the Tyler Clementi suicide, there’s been a lot of talk about how privacy invasions or privacy breaches might lead to desperate measures such as suicide. The veteran at the heart of a terrible privacy breach involving the Department of Veterans Affairs in Canada says that the violation of his privacy made him suicidal: A…

I was running my usual searches and the like to find items that I might want to post to my blogs, when I came across a link to an item and where the first line or so of the entry in the search engine results looked interesting. So I clicked on the link, only to…

It’s now been a full year since the new breach reporting requirements went into effect for HIPAA-covered entities.   Although I’ve regularly updated this blog with new incidents revealed on HHS’s web site,  it might be useful to look at some statistics for the first year’s worth of reports. During this period,  166 breaches each…

More fallout from a breach I’ve been covering on this blog involving bureaucrats accessing a veteran’s psychiatric records. Laura Payton reports: Bureaucrats could lose their jobs for circulating a veteran’s confidential medical files, the veterans affairs minister said Thursday. Jean-Pierre Blackburn says he’s still deciding what to do with officials who accessed the personal files…

A war veteran who was the victim of a privacy breach at the hands of bureaucrats with Canada’s Veterans Affairs Department is calling for an apology and a full public inquiry. Privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart on Thursday released the results of an investigation which found that the department broke the law in its handling of…