A few weeks ago, the Mayo Clinic fired an employee who had been snooping in patient records for years. Now Meg Alexander reports that Fairmont Medical Center – Mayo Health has fired six employees for breaching patient confidentiality: Six employees have been fired by Fairmont Medical Center because of a breach in patient confidentiality,…
Category: Health Data
UK: Health records loss 'breached data protection rules
An NHS board breached data protection rules when a member of staff lost sensitive patient records, an investigation has found. The medical records of patients at a secure hospital near Falkirk were uploaded onto a personal memory stick, which was then lost. It was found by a 12-year-old boy in a supermarket car park in…
Five indicted in Johns Hopkins Hospital ID theft ring
A federal grand jury has indicted the following five Maryland defendants on fraud and aggravated identity theft charges in connection with a scheme to use stolen hospital patient identity information to open fraudulent credit accounts and make purchases on “instant credit” at retail stores in Maryland: Michael Allen, age 34, of Baltimore, Jasmine Amber Smith,…
Update on my FOI request to HHS/OCR for breach reports
I received a phone call from OCR this morning to discuss my FOI request for the breach reports HHS is receiving under HITECH regulations. I had requested electronic copies of the reporting forms breached entities submitted via HHS’s web site. The conversation was a bit of an eye-opener for me. First, it turns out…
Did the punishment fit the "crime?" (the Lucile Salter Packard Hospital breach fines)
Jason C. Gavejian writes about a hospital breach that is causing waves because of the exorbitant fine the state imposed. Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at StanfordUniversity was fined $250,000 earlier this year by the California Department of Public Health (“CDPH”) for an alleged delay in reporting a breach under California’s health information privacy law. What makes…
TX: $60 for Appliances, Furniture, Social Security Numbers, and Medical Records
Omar Villafranca reports that a winning $60 storage unit auction bid yielded personal and medical information on hundreds of people: But the storage unit also had boxes of sensitive information, including copies of drivers licenses and Social Security cards, credit union reports and financial reports. The letters were addressed to a closed-down nursing facility. The…