T. Rees Shapiro reports: A laptop containing health records for 2,000 Fairfax County public school students was stolen out of a health department employee’s car, possibly compromising the confidential information, school and health officials said. In a letter to families, school officials said that the laptop was stolen on July 15, when someone broke into a school…
Category: Health Data
HHS updates its breach tool, but still leaves us pretty much in the dark
HHS has added 19 reports to its breach tool. Some of these have been previously covered on this blog, and I’ve linked to the coverage below: Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital Fort Worth/Shred-it Iowa Department of Human Services (affected 7,335, a fact we did not previously know) San Jose Medical Supply Co. (affected 800, a fact…
Walgreens must pay woman $1.44 million over HIPAA violation
Tim Evans reports: A Marion County jury Friday awarded a woman $1.44 million after finding Walgreens and a pharmacist violated her privacy when the pharmacist looked up and shared the woman’s prescription history. The lawsuit filed in Marion Superior Court spun out of a tangled relationship between the pharmacist, her husband and the man’s ex-girlfriend….
Oregon Health & Science University notifies patients of ‘cloud’ health information storage
Oregon Health & Science University is notifying 3,044 patients that their OHSU health information was stored on an Internet-based email and/or document storage service, also known as a “cloud” computing system. Although the Internet-based service provider (Google Drive, Google Mail) is password-protected and has security measures and policies in place to protect information, it is…
Ca: Victoria doctor under fire over alleged breach of privacy
Cindy Harnett and Nick Wells report that a Victoria urologist is under investigation by health authorities over allegations he photographed an unconscious, morbidly obese male patient and sent the picture to a friend. Read more on The Province. There are lots of understandable reasons why a doctor might want to share an unusual or interesting case…
California medical privacy breach stats, updated
Several weeks ago, I posted some medical privacy breach statistics I obtained from California (see the chart here) This week, I found some more recent figures. I have no idea why the numbers for some entries do not match what they provided me with previously. But it would appear from the more recent figures that…