At a time when concerns about the privacy and security of electronic health records are a hot topic and the issue of private vs. public health insurance is making the front pages, a lawsuit filed by a former Kaiser employee alleges that Kaiser knowingly and repeatedly violated HIPAA, exposed millions of members to identity theft,…
Category: Health Data
HIPAA security rule enforcement shifts to OCR
The secretary of HHS shifted enforcement of the HIPAA Security Rule from CMS to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), according to an HHS announcement published Tuesday in the Federal Register. Until now, OCR has enforced only the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which protects the privacy of patients’ health information and the confidentiality provisions of the…
Clinic employee sentenced for ID theft
Bill Mercer, United States Attorney for the District of Montana, announced Monday that during a federal court session in Missoula, on July 31, 2009, before U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy, Andrea Mackowiak, a 33-year-old resident of Columbia Falls, was sentenced to a term of prison for 24 months. She was also ordered to pay…
Employee violated HIPAA but got job back
A Wisconsin hospital employee fired for accessing the medical records of her estranged son so she could find him has been reinstated after an arbitrator called her punishment excessive. The 30-year veteran of St. Francis Hospital in Milwaukee was fired after an investigation found she repeatedly accessed her son’s records in violation of federal privacy…
FL: Man accused of stealing credit card numbers
It was the furtive swiping under the counter that caught the customer’s attention. Curious, the customer leaned over the counter to see the cashier swiping his debit card into a portable scanner. A similar device was hanging on the cashier’s key chain. Before his credit card number could be stolen, the customer grabbed the device…
CO: Hospice nurse pleads in identity theft cases
A Greeley hospice nurse pleaded guilty Thursday in a case in which she was stealing prescription drugs from hospice patients. Marguerite Furgerson, 30, pleaded guilty to four counts of felony Identity Theft, one count for each of the four cases she had with the Weld District Attorney’s Office, according to a prepared release. Read more…