In a press release issued yesterday and posted today, HHS writes: Shasta Regional Medical Center (SRMC) has agreed to a comprehensive corrective action plan to settle a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) investigation concerning potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy Rule. The HHS Office for Civil…
Category: Health Data
NC veterans' PHI left in recycle bin
Associated Press reports: The Veterans Affairs hospital in Fayetteville says documents containing the personal information of nearly 1,100 veterans were found in a recycling bin two months ago. The Fayetteville VA Medical Center announced Friday it’s notifying the 1,093 affected veterans whose consultation reports from the optical shop were incorrectly placed in a recycle bin…
NZ: Pathways mops up privacy breach
Jenee Tibshraeny of NewsTalkZB reports: An organisation that works with mental health patients is trying to mop up the mess it created by a somewhat old-fashioned privacy breach. It lost documents containing the names, addresses and clinical details of 65 of its clients, when a staff member left their bag on a Wellington bus last…
U.K.: Fax blunder leads to £55,000 penalty for Staffordshire trust
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued a monetary penalty of £55,000 to North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust. The penalty follows a serious breach of the Data Protection Act which resulted in sensitive medical details of three patients being sent to a member of the public. The details were released between August and September 2011 when…
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital notifying 12,900 after laptop stolen from secured badge-access area
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital is no stranger to stolen equipment containing PHI. In January, 2010, they self-reported a breach involving a stolen desktop computer with PHI on 532 patients, and as recently as January, they notified 57,000 patients after a laptop was stolen from a physician’s car. Now the hospital is notifying patients about another breach…
House panel to probe alleged seizure of medical records by IRS
And speaking of outrageous breaches, Elise Viebeck reports: A top House committee launched another probe of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Tuesday after a lawsuit alleged that the agency improperly seized millions of personal medical records in California. In a letter, Republican leaders on the Energy and Commerce panel asked the IRS to explain how it…