Sometimes it’s hard to wrap my head around the fact the hospital employees engage in egregious privacy and confidentiality violations. Christine Stuart of Courthouse News reports on a lawsuit against Saint Raphael Healthcare System . The lawsuit alleges that in June, 2011, a Hospital of St. Raphael employee used his cellphone to take a picture…
Category: Health Data
It's 10 pm. Do you know where your patients' data are?
Financial disputes may underlie some vendors retaining patient or client data – as in the Kaiser Permanente/Surefile Filing Systems case I’ve blogged about on this site or the Irvine Scientific breach I described on DataBreaches.net. But there are other possible motivations for not relinquishing or taking data as well. Maura Lerner of the Star Tribune…
What percent of patients notified of a privacy breach actually change providers?
Infographics are getting as overused as PowerPoint, but occasionally I see one that catches my eye with an interesting finding. Case in point: this infographic with the results of a U.S. patient survey conducted in 2011 by FairWarning (open in new window and click to enlarge). My comments are after the infographic. Some of the…
Breaking up is hard to do, part 2: The vendor strikes back
Today’s Los Angeles Times covers a situation I discussed yesterday involving Kaiser Permanente and Surefile Filing Systems*. Because Chad Terhune’s report involves statements by Stephan Dean, owner of Surefile, some of its details may appear to contradict what I reported yesterday. In actuality, the “he said – they said” nature of the reporting simply emphasizes…
Breaking up is hard to do: Kaiser Permanente sues former business associate for return of information
In June of 2012, I mentioned a dispute between Kaiser and one of its former business associates, Surefile Filing Systems. At that time, Chris Rauber had reported: “Kaiser handed over to me several hundred thousand patient records without a written contract” in 2008 and the following year, said Stephan Dean, who owns Surefile with his wife,…
Medicaid fraud scheme used children's Medicaid numbers and misappropriated therapists' Medicaid provider numbers
Here’s a case where Medicaid fraud created mental health and behavioral records in young people’s records that could have come back to cause difficulty for them at some point. The scheme also involved stealing a therapist’s identity/Medicaid provider number, which could have created serious problems for the therapist. The following is part of a press…