Some people just still don’t get it and continue to dispose of sensitive records improperly. From CBC in Canada: Saskatchewan authorities are investigating after several boxes containing the medical files of about 1,000 patients were discovered intact in a paper-recycling bin in Regina. Gary Dickson, the province’s information and privacy commissioner, told CBC News on…
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Location Privacy And Wireless Body Area Networks
MIT Technology Review’s The Physics arXiv Blog has an article that gave me some food for thought about the wireless monitoring systems being used on patients to record blood pressure and other vital signs or activity. Although the health data/measures may be encrypted, the location of the device’s unique hardware address is not encrypted…
Congressman tackles HIPAA Catch-22 to help medical ID theft victims
Last week, I posted a news item about how medical ID theft victims were getting victimized twice – once by the criminal and once by those hospitals that interpret HIPAA as barring them from showing patients their own records if they contain information on another patient – even if that patient is the ID thief….
Former hospital administrator who fired two whistleblower nurses gets jail time for his abuse of official capacity
It’s nice to see a small measure of justice occasionally. Back in 2009, I covered a report about two nurses, subsequently identified as Anne Mitchell, RN and Vickilyn Galle, RN, who were facing jail time for reporting a physician, Dr. Rolando Arafiles, to the Texas Medical Board. According to investigators with the Attorney General’s Office,…
Way to risk those lawsuits, U. Iowa!
Having your employees find out that you are monitoring them surreptitiously doesn’t make for happy employees and may lead to legal problems in terms of surveillance laws and labor laws. Having a patient privacy incident can be infinitely worse. Managing to risk combining both can be a nightmare. But that’s somewhat what happened recently in…
Update to Ortho Montana incident (revised)
As an update to the report on a missing laptop containing information on patients at Ortho Montana, Ortho Montana did report the incident to HHS. In their notification, they indicated that 37,000 patients were notified of the December 17th incident. A statement on Ortho Montana’s site says: Recently, we learned that a laptop belonging…