Molly Rosbach reports: Virginia Mason Memorial hospital sent out letters last week to 419 of its past emergency room patients, alerting them of a privacy violation. A routine internal audit revealed that from roughly October to January, 21 employees at the hospital had improperly accessed those patients’ records. Read more on The Yakima Herald. A…
Category: Health Data
New York State Inspector General Announces Arrest Of Psychiatrist Charged With Falsifying Inmate Patient Medical Records
April 14 – New York State Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott announced the arrest of Morales D. Brown, a psychiatrist working for the New York State Office of Mental Health at its Central New York Psychiatric Center, on charges he stole over $6,524 from New York State by submitting falsified time and attendance records. Additionally,…
USF issues substitute notice after email error exposed names and email addresses
The University of South Florida (“USF”) is posting this substitute notice in a good faith attempt to notify those affected individuals for whom we have insufficient or out-of-date contact information that precludes written notification. We take individuals’ privacy very seriously and we are addressing this matter expeditiously to ensure the trust of our patients and…
Healthcare breach reports continued to climb in March
Protenus has released their Breach Barometer report for March. The report is based on 39 incidents that reportedly affected 1,519,521 patients’ records. As noted in recent months, we’ve reached that unhappy stage where we are seeing an average of one or more breach disclosures every day. If this just represented greater transparency, that would be great, but it…
Metro Community Provider Network settles HHS breach charges for $400,000 and corrective action plan
HHS announced another settlement today. This one stemmed from a 2011 incident that was previously covered on this site. Once again, the take-home message is that you need to do a risk assessment, and you need a risk management plan commensurate with your risk assessment. In this case, there was no prior risk assessment, and…
ECMC officials remain mute on cause of computer shutdown
Stephen T. Watson reports: Erie County Medical Center officials say a virus that has shut down the hospital’s entire computer network since early Sunday morning has not affected the care delivered to patients or nursing home residents. The hospital has accepted all incoming patients and has moved ahead with all scheduled surgical procedures, said Peter Cutler, an…