The owner of a Houston, Texas behavioral business was charged on Wednesday with 17 counts for a scheme to defraud Medicaid for more than $1 million, prosecutors announced. Edward Birts, 51, the owner of Courage to Change, is accused of aggravated identity theft for allegedly unlawfully acquiring Medicaid beneficiaries’ information. He used the names, addresses…
Category: Health Data
File-Sharing Software Potential Threat to Health Privacy
The personal health and financial information stored in thousands of North American home computers may be vulnerable to theft through file-sharing software, according to a research study published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. […] El Emam’s CHEO team used popular file sharing software to gain access to documents they downloaded…
ER worker accused of stealing dying man’s credit cards
This is not the first time we’ve heard about hospital workers stealing dying patients’ credit cards or information, but it is nonetheless distressing. Candice Ferrette reports on a case at Westchester Medical Center in NY, where a patient care technician in the emergency room has been accused of stealing credit cards from a dying plane…
Lawsuit filed against Elgin clinic over P2P breach
Steven Ross Johnson reports on a lawsuit involving P2P filesharing and patient data: Officials from a local medical clinic remained silent Monday about claims they allowed sensitive information on AIDS patients to be leaked. Calls to the Open Door Clinic of Greater Elgin, 164 Division St., were not returned Monday. The allegations, made in a…
NL: Data of medical applicants leaked
Karin Spaink provides this English summary of a breach that was reported in Bits of Freedom, March 1, 2010 and that affected an unknown number of people: The data of people who applied for a specialization as general practitioner after having finished their primary medical eduction, leaked via the website Huisartsenopleiding. Appending a first name…
Medical identity theft strikes 5.8% of American adults
Ellen Messmer reports: Identity thieves are not only interested in tapping financial resources, but are also after your medical identification data and services. Medical identity theft typically involves stolen insurance card information, or costs related to medical care and equipment given to others using the victim’s name. Roughly 5.8% of American adults have been victimized,…