The following is not a new incident. It is just a newly disclosed incident because of a law enforcement-requested delay in disclosure.
North Shore University Hospital (NSUH) issued a notice on February 1, 2022 concerning insider-wrongdoing. The notice begins:
NSUH learned that a former employee who worked at a medical office may have improperly accessed patient records from its electronic medical record systems in violation of its policies. After thorough investigation, it was determined on April 11, 2019, that the employee improperly accessed certain patient information between October 2009 and February 2019.
The employee was suspended during the investigation and was subsequently terminated. NSUH notified law enforcement of the incident and has cooperated with the investigation, which included following law enforcement’s instructions to delay notifying any patients who were potentially impacted by this incident until February 1, 2022.
To date, NSUH has no evidence that the information that the former employee may have improperly accessed was misused in any manner. Also, to the best of the hospital’s knowledge, law enforcement did not bring any charges against the former employee.
Read the remainder of the notice at https://nsuh.northwell.edu/sites/northwell.edu/files/2022-02/NSUH-data-breach-media-notice.pdf
The patient notice can be found at: https://www.northwell.edu/sites/northwell.edu/files/2022-02/substitute-notice-nsuh-data-breach-patient-letter.pdf
NSUH is part of Northwell Health, as is Long Island Jewish Hospital. In August, 2021, LIJ Hospital disclosed that it was notifying more than 10,000 patients about an insider-wrongdoing incident that began August 23, 2016 and continued through October 31, 2017. The hospital appears to have been unaware of any improper access by that employee until they received a subpoena on January 24, 2020 concerning an investigation into a “no-fault accident insurance” scheme. In the course of complying with law enforcement, they discovered that the employee named in the subpoena had been accessing some patients’ records without legitimate need.
Like NSUH, LIJ Hospital had been asked/told to delay notification.
There has been no statement to indicate that there is any connection between these two reports, but then again, there has been no statement that there is no connection and both of them did involve law enforcement investigations and employee wrongdoing and the time periods overlap. DataBreaches.net sent an email inquiry to Northwell Health, but no reply was immediately provided. This post will be updated if more information becomes available.