HHS updated its breach tool yesterday. The following is an annotated list of new entries on their list. It is not clear to me why there are breach entries where the breaches occurred in 2011 or 2012. Did HHS delay in adding incidents to the breach tool or are entities first discovering and/or reporting the…
Category: Health Data
NZ: Nurse suspended for privacy breach
Wilma McCorkindale reports: A former Dunedin enrolled nurse who illegally accessed details of a patient’s termination of pregnancy and then texted another person about it has been suspended from practising. Rayleen Jeanette Park has appeared before the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal on charges under the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act 2003. In a tribunal decision…
A privacy/confidentiality breach risks medical mistakes
Here’s a situation in which there’s clearly been a privacy breach, but the privacy issues may actually be the least of the patients’ problems. Heather Graf reports that a former patient at the Carol Milgard Breast Center has filed a complaint after discovering three other patients’ records were mixed in with her own, raising questions of…
Ca: Colbourne no longer listed as a defendant in privacy breach class-action lawsuit
Diane Crocker reports: The woman alleged to have inappropriately accessed the files of over 1,000 people while employed as a clerk with Western Health at Western Memorial Regional Hospital in Corner Brook has been removed as a defendant in a class-action lawsuit over the privacy breach. That leaves Western Health as the sole defendant in…
FTC complaint against LabMD could serve as guidance to businesses on data security
The Federal Trade Commission has released a provisionally redacted public version of its complaint against LabMD (PHIprivacy.net’s coverage of LabMD linked here). The complaint provides what could be useful guidance as to what types of practices the FTC considers to be problematic practices under the Act: 10. At all relevant times, respondent engaged in a number of…
Errant e-mail creates security breach at MNsure
And we’re off and running with health insurance exchanges. Jackie Crosby reports: A MNsure employee accidentally sent an e-mail file to an Apple Valley insurance broker’s office on Thursday that contained Social Security numbers, names, business addresses and other identifying information on more than 2,400 insurance agents. An official at MNsure, the state’s new online health insurance exchange, acknowledged it…