HealthITSecurity has reports on two HIPAA breaches reported to HHS. The first involved two employees of Baptist Health and Arkansas Health Group taking information on 6,500 patients with them to their new employer, Bray Family Health. The second incident involved a laptop missing from Johns Hopkins Medicine that contained health information for 571 cancer patients and 267 study participants. You can…
Category: Health Data
UK: Online pharmacy, Pharmacy2U, fined £130,000 for selling customer details
From the Information Commissioner’s Office: An online pharmacy that sold details of more than 20,000 customers to marketing companies has been fined £130,000. Pharmacy 2U offered the customer names and addresses for sale through an online marketing list company. Companies that bought the details included a health supplements company that has been cautioned for misleading advertising…
UK: GP surgery apologizes after mailing error exposes children’s personal information
atroughton reports: GP surgery bosses have apologised to parents after letters containing personal information about children were sent to the wrong addresses. Bosses at the Latham House Medical Practice in Melton have apologised after up to 200 child flu vaccination consent forms were sent out to the wrong addresses. These forms gave the child’s name, date…
2 Manitoba nurses fined $1K each for breaching patient privacy
CBC News reports that two nurses have been fined for privacy violations that did not involve snooping: Two Manitoba nurses have been slapped with $1,000 fines each in two separate incidents in which the confidential medical information of a patient was shared — in violation of privacy rules. Read more on CBC News.
NHS Health Apps Library closing amid questions about app security & quality: what can we learn?
Satish Misra, M.D. writes: The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) launched the Health Apps Library as part of their NHS Choices program in 2013. It was pitched as a pilot program, one that would guide patients and clinicians to safe, effective health apps. And now after a troubled two years, the NHS Health Apps…
NC: DHHS reveals potential Medicaid data breach
WRAL reports that North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services is notifying 1,615 Medicaid patients that a breach of security protocol may have compromised their confidential health information. The breach occurred Aug. 19, when an email with an attached spreadsheet was emailed without encryption to the Granville County Health Department. Although the email was…