Last week, a few mainstream news articles noted that the Identity Theft Resource Center’s database revealed that 113 of the 385 breaches they had recorded for this year involved the health care sector. As Brian Horowitz of eWeek noted, only breaches that include SSN, financial information, or driver’s license numbers are included in ITRC’s database….
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Walgreens still under investigation by OCR
Dom Nicastro of HealthLeaders Media reports: The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) confirmed this week its investigation into the nation’s largest drugstore chain, Walgreens, based on the same television media reports that led to million-dollar settlements with CVS and Rite Aid for potential HIPAA violations. The investigation stems from a 2006 series of articles by…
CDT breaks down proposed changes to HIPAA
The Center For Democracy and Technology (CDT) just sent out this announcement: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed a set of significant updates to health privacy rules. The proposed rule tackles how sensitive patient information is handled under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which is the nation’s foremost…
Thousands of ‘Subcontractors’ May Soon Have to Comply With HIPAA
AIS’s Health Business Daily has reprinted an article from REPORT ON PATIENT PRIVACY that talks about the expansion of mandates to subcontractors: Perhaps the biggest surprise in HHS’s July 14 proposed rulemaking was a concept that went beyond language contained in the HITECH Act, namely the appearance of the term “subcontractors” in the list of…
United HealthGroup reports second breach involving paper records
For the second time in as many months, United HealthGroup has reported a breach to HHS that involved paper records. Because HHS does not provide a lot of details on its web site, all we know for this latest incident is that 735 individuals were affected by an incident involving “theft, unauthorized access” that occurred…
Recent computer thefts at Montefiore affected 39,000
As a brief update on the Montefiore Medical Center breaches reported previously: According to a hospital spokesperson with whom I spoke today, the Finance Department theft affected 16,000 patients, while the School Health Program theft affected 23,000 students and their families. No arrest has been made in either case yet. The hospital declined to be…