Category: Health Data

Sutter Health East Bay Region is notifying patients of a breach they first learned about on May 23. According to their letter, a copy of which was provided to the California Attorney General’s Office, on May 23, they were notified by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office that patient information had been discovered as part of an…

While I was away, HHS updated its breach tool again. As is often the case, some of their new entries are breaches we knew about already: University of Florida University of Rochester Medical Center & Affiliates Presbyterian Anesthesia Associates PA/E-dreamz Comfort Dental Regional Medical Center Piedmont HealthCare, P.A/E-dreamz Sonoma Valley Hospital Dent Neurologic Group, LLP…

Here are some breach reports you won’t see on HHS’s breach tool because they involve only a few patients, but they all involve human error by CareFirst employees who were mailing out information or claims: One insured’s payment receipt with Social Security number was mailed to another individual; One person’s claims information, including medical details was…

LabCorp (Laboratory Corporation of America) has suffered yet another breach involving patient data. On April 19, the firm notified the Maryland Attorney General’s Office that a computer tagged for destruction had been stolen from one of its facilities in North Carolina. The computer contained patient names, date of birth, and Medicare subscriber numbers. LabCorp’s notification…

There was some great reporting by Jordan Robertson of Bloomberg while I was away: Hospitals in the U.S. pledge to keep a patient’s health background confidential. Yet states from Washington to New York are putting privacy at risk by selling records that can be used to link a person’s identity to medical conditions using public information. Consider Ray Boylston,…

Apparently there are still clinicians out there who never heard of encryption and whose patient or client data may wind up on re-sold hard drives, as this social worker discovered the hard way.  This breach doesn’t speak well for Other World Computing, either. Thankfully, the drive with PHI was acquired by someone who understood the…