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….
Category: Health Data
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…
X-rays involving more than 15,000 Henry Ford Health System patients stolen from storage warehouse
Associated Press reports that more than 15,000 X-rays of Henry Ford Health System patients were stolen from a warehouse in May. Read more here. The health system posted a substitute notice on July 16: Henry Ford Health System is notifying patients about their health information after old X-ray films were stolen from a storage warehouse before…
OR: Samaritan Health investigates improper disposal of medical records
Hundreds of medical records found unshredded in the trash. Again. This time it’s Samaritan Family Medicine Resident Clinic, part of Samaritan Health Services. Police were called but did nothing because, once again, no law was broken. It is disturbing that in 2013, most states still do not have data security or breach laws that include paper…