Category: Health Data

A group of international psychology researchers is retracting three papers in the wake of revelations that they failed to adequately safeguard the identities of the patients who participated in the studies. So far, only one article has been formally retracted. That article, “Combining biofeedback and Narrative Exposure Therapy for persistent pain and PTSD in refugees:…

Misdirecting e-mail with PHI is bad.  Misdirecting it to a reporter, well, that’s just begging for bad press. Carolyn Y. Johnson reports: The first e-mail came at the end of June. It was from a doctor’s office in another state—a large cardiology group. The note listed the name of a test. It listed the full…

On June 7, Vitreo-Retinal Medical Group, Inc. (dba Retinal Consultants Medical Group) discovered that a laptop computer which was a component of a diagnostic imaging machine, was stolen sometime after the office closed on June 5. The laptop contained unsecured PHI including patient names, dates of birth, gender, race, and OCT (optical coherence tomography) images. In…

More details have emerged on the Medtronic breach noted previously on this blog. Christopher Snowbeck reports: In early July, the manufacturer notified patients about a box of training records that had gone missing from a facility in Minnesota, Resman said. Most of the documents and records in the box dated back to 2008 and were…

Over on HealthITSecurity.com, Patrick Ouellette has an article on data breach response trends. You can read it here.

Matthew Patane reports that Rocky Mountain Spine Clinic announced Wednesday that a former employee was fired after creating a document with PHI on 532 patients that she sent to her personal email account.   The document contained patient names, insurance company information and tracked patient surgeries. The employee, who worked for the clinic’s billing department, said she…