A bag containing a document with the names and Social Security numbers of 554 patients of Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center was stolen from an employee’s locked car, medical center officials said today. The theft happened Feb. 15 in the parking deck of an off-campus outpatient clinic, officials said. The list did not include…
Category: Health Data
Auctioning off patient records
What stops a storage company from auctioning off the contents of abandoned storage units or units that are in arrears when the contents are medical records? Maybe nothing.
Texas behavioral counseling business owner charged with health care fraud
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…
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…