Kimberly Leonard reports: Only two state attorneys general have pursued the authority Congress gave them two years ago to prosecute privacy and security breaches of health information — despite training from federal agencies and a consensus among privacy groups that enforcement needs to improve. […] Experts blame a variety of factors for the apparent disinterest…
Category: Health Data
NYU Langone Medical Center's Hospital for Joint Diseases Notifies Patients Of Potential Data Breach
Another potential breach at NYU Langone Medical Center, it seems. From their notice, posted August 22: NYU Langone Medical Center’s Hospital for Joint Diseases (HJD) notified patients that documents containing limited personal information were mistakenly discarded, compacted and buried in a landfill outside of New York State. The documents consisted of paper tracking records of…
Yanez Dental notifies over 10,000 patients that their Social Security numbers and birthdates were on stolen computers
Yanez Dental Corporation in California recently reported a data breach to HHS. In a notice on their web site dated June 15, they write, in part: Our dental office was burglarized (5/22/2011). We have reported this incident to the police for investigation. The vandals stole three of our computers among other things. Personal information stored…
Over 82,000 patients in NJ and IL notified of theft of unencrypted drive left by a MedAssets employee in a car
On August 8, the Saint Barnabas Health Care System in New Jersey publicly disclosed a breach involving a Business Associate, MedAssets: MedAssets, Inc., an independent revenue management and supply chain company that provides certain administrative and business services to the Saint Barnabas Health Care System, informed us on July 1, 2011 that an unencrypted external…
AU: Privacy of patients breached by Professional Services Review
Sean Parnell, FOI Editor, writes: Patient privacy has been compromised in the federal government’s bid to control health spending, with a key agency found to have illegally merged data from Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. In a case likely to fuel privacy concerns over planned electronic health records, the embattled Professional Services Review has…
Fake doc pleads guilty to criminal HIPAA charges and healthcare fraud
Criminal HIPAA convictions are still pretty rare. Here’s a case prosecuted in the Northern District of Georgia: Matthew Paul Brown, 30, formerly of Atlanta, Georgia and Nashville, Tennessee, pleaded guilty on September 14 in federal district court to charges of health care fraud and wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information. According to United States…