HHS has just issued this press release concerning a settlement of charges arising out of a breach previously covered on this site in 2011: Adult & Pediatric Dermatology, P.C., of Concord, Mass., (APDerm) has agreed to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification…
Category: Health Data
FL: Health department workers admit to stealing patient info
Following up on a breach related to tax refund fraud scheme, noted here in October. Amy Pavuk reports: Two now-former Department of Health employees have admitted in federal court that they illegally took private information on hundreds of patients, which was then used in a tax-return scheme. The discovery and arrests of Shanterica Smith and Gerald…
Wichita man believes identity thief was medical billing employee
We might one to cross-file this one under “dumb criminals,” because the fraudster was caught, in part, because she uploaded a picture of her ticket to a Oklahoma City Thunder game – and the visible serial number on the ticket was linked to a patient’s credit card she had misusing. Phil White reports Paul Vick is a…
MD: Walgreens employee prosecuted for misusing customers' credit card numbers
It seems that Walgreens had an insider breach at their Harford Rd., Baltimore store. On November 27, they reported to the the Maryland Attorney General’s office that a pharmacy employee had been accessing misusing customers’ credit card numbers. Eight Maryland residents were affected. Walgreens learned of the breach on November 4, terminated the employee, and…
Details emerge on Hospital for Special Surgery breach
On November 15, I reported on some updates to HHS’s breach tool. One of the entries I wrote was: The Hospital for Special Surgery in New York reported that 537 patients had PHI stolen on March 19, although it’s not clear from HHS’s log whether the data were stolen from a computer or if the computer itself…
[CORRECTED] Woman Sues Customs and Border Protection Agents for Outrageous Six-Hour Search
[CORRECTION and APOLOGY: The original headline for this post incorrectly identified the defendants as “Border Patrol Agents.” They are not. The complaint was filed against a number of defendants, including “Two Unknown United States Customs and Border Protection Supervising Agents; United States Customs and Border Protection Agent Portillo and United States Customs and Border Protection Agent Herrera.”…