Friday afternoon and HHS has added dozens of new updates/revisions to the breach tool – after adding dozens more during the week? Yikes. As before, some of them appear to be older incidents that had never been posted publicly while others are more recent. One change that I noted immediately is that they’ve now organized…
Category: Health Data
NY Court of Appeals rules employer not liable for actions of employee acting outside scope of employment
There’s a follow-up to a breach lawsuit involving an employee of Guthrie Health System who shared a patients’ sensitive medical information with a third party – and privacy advocates will not be happy. As I first noted in March 2011, “John Doe” sued Guthrie Health System after a nurse sent embarrassing text messages about his…
GA: Phoebe Putney Hospital notifies 6,777 patients about stolen computer
WALB reports: Phoebe Putney Hospital is notifying thousands of patients that their medical information has been compromised by the disappearance of a hospital computer. Phoebe confirmed to WALB News 10 that on November 6, 2013, the hospital learned that a password protected unencrypted desktop computer disappeared from one of its clinics the day before. Read more…
Thumb drive with personal information of Milwaukee employees recovered
There’s an important update in the Dynacare breach that affected City of Milwaukee employees. Fox6 reports that a 17-year-old male has been arrested for his role in the theft of the thumb drive, laptop, and computer bag that were stolen from the employee’s car on October 22. According to Fox6 and other media reports, the…
Dentrix claims it encrypts their data, but does it?
A few weeks ago, I had no idea what Dentrix software was. Now I’ve seen it mentioned in connection with two recent breaches involving PHI (the first one was this breach, involving an older version of Dentrix). Such coincidences often get my attention. Dr. Rob Meaglia is a dentist in Rocklin, California. According to his December…
HHS updates breach tool, Part 2: it's news to me
Today’s update to HHS’s breach tool included a number of incidents that I had not known about: Servicios Medicos Integrados de Fajardo in Puerto Rico reported that T & P Consulting, Inc. d/b/a Quantum Health Consulting reported lost device(s) with PHI on 10,000. The incident occurred on January 11, 2012, and I had already entered…