Statement from Sutter Health today: Sutter Physicians Services (SPS) and Sutter Medical Foundation (SMF) — two affiliates within the Sutter Health network of care — announced the theft of a company-issued password-protected unencrypted desktop computer from SMF’s administrative offices in Sacramento the weekend of Oct. 15, 2011. Following discovery of the theft, Sutter Health immediately…
Category: Health Data
NJ: Grieving mother wants law to protect privacy of accident victims
Nora Muchanic of WPVI reports that a distraught New Jersey mother is fighting for legislation that would spare others the anguish she experienced when a first responder uploaded crash photos of her daughter’s accident online before she even knew that her daughter had been in a fatal crash. Cathy Bates, 40, was killed in a…
Berkeley HeartLab notifies patients of insider breach involving theft of trade secrets
Berkeley HeartLab (a Celera business) notified the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office that in late September of this year, it learned that a former employee had accessed patient data in “2008 and/or 2009.” The employee subsequently went to work for an unnamed competitor, and BHL believes that the employee took the data for competitive purposes…
Healthcare most breached industry in 2011? Not by my analyses.
The following was originally posted to PHIprivacy.net. The carousel image for this post reflects 2011 statistics from DataLossDB and is used with permission. Note that healthcare sector breaches account for a smaller percentage of total breaches reported in 2011 compared to 2010 while business sector breaches account for a larger percentage of total breaches compared to…
Healthcare most breached industry in 2011? Not by my analyses.
To his credit, Dave Kennedy tried to analyze breaches based on Privacy Rights Clearinghouse data. PRC’s database begins with 2005 breaches and allows interested individuals to sort by year, breach type, and sector. After pulling out the numbers for 2010 and 2011 to compare to previous years, Kennedy reports that healthcare was/is the most breached…
Senator Franken considering legislation to encourage (but not require?) encryption for healthcare and OMR providers
Coverage by Diana Bartz of Reuter’s from today’s Senate subcommittee hearing on protecting health information privacy in a digital world: […] “We know from the statistics on breaches that have occurred since the notification provisions went into effect in 2009 that the healthcare industry appears to be rarely encrypting data,” according to written testimony by Deven…