An editorial in the Detroit Free Press: There’s a lesson for state lawmakers in a dispute brewing between a tiny Van Buren County school district and the Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union. The Lawton district and the MEA are at odds over the limits of a recent Michigan law allowing school districts…
Category: Health Data
File stolen from Johns Hopkins employee vehicle contained sensitive info
Just to keep our records and chronologies complete, I am posting this breach that occurred in December 2007; notification was made in January 2008, but it just came to our attention: A folder stolen from the vehicle of an employee of Johns Hopkins contained sensitive information on 190 former and current members of an outpatient…
Fight or flight; Woman ordered to open medical files in order to fly home
Jordan Press writes in The Kingston Whig-Standard: A Kingston woman who had to hand over personal medical records to get on an Air Canada flight home was expected to finally arrive some time last night. Patricia Whiteside-Bell stood in line ready to head through the metal detectors at the airport in Fort McMurray, Alta., Saturday…
L.A. woman accused of stealing stars' medical info
Dan Whitcomb reports: A former hospital worker implicated in the theft of medical records for “Charlie’s Angels” star Farrah Fawcett, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife and some 60 other celebrities and selling them to the media has been indicted on federal charges. Lawanda Jackson, a former low-level administrative specialist at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles,…
Identity theft drug scheme spanned 11 states
In an update to a previous story, Scott Daughterty of The Capital reports: The Garrett County woman didn’t have back pain. She didn’t visit hospitals in 11 states to get prescription pain killers to help her cope. Still, federal prosecutors said, the hospitals kept sending her bills demanding payment for those medications and services. One…
Medical Data Breaches Put Patients at Risk
Kim S. Nash writes in CIO: Doctors can’t cure the common cold and health care IT managers apparently can’t stop the common data breach. Twenty-one of the 101 of the breaches tracked so far this year by information security group Attrition.org occurred at health care organizations. Well, that’s not right, as I pointed out in…