George Hulme writes: Despite the aim of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to bolster the security and privacy of patient information, a majority of health-care providers believe more should — and can — be done. And a newly formed consortium of industry leaders plans to do something about it. A group of nine…
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Ex-guard pleads guilty to ID theft (follow-up)
Michael P. McKinney reports: A former security guard at Rhode Island Hospital has pleaded guilty in federal court to stealing patients’ and job applicants’ identity information and using it to open cell phone and charge accounts at RadioShack. […] Prosecutor Adi Goldstein said at the plea hearing the government could show that from April 2006…
Corrective Action Plan and $100,000 Fine Illustrate Tougher HHS Stance on HIPAA Enforcement
Reprinted from REPORT ON PATIENT PRIVACY, the industry’s most practical source of news on HIPAA patient privacy provisions. For the first time, a covered entity (CE) under the privacy and security rules has made a $100,000 payment to Uncle Sam and agreed to subject itself to three years of monitoring by HHS for losing unencrypted…
Lost tape holds credit data (follow-up)
The BNY Mellon breach apparently affected patient account info, as well. The incident occurred in April, and letters first went out this month. Eileen Smith of the Courier-Post reports: People who have made payments to the University of Pennsylvania Health System have been notified that tapes containing personal information about their accounts have gone missing….
Nurses posts brain surgery pictures on Facebook
Jessica Salter reports in the Telegraph: Her job at a hospital in Stockholm is now at risk after she put 14 photos from a brain surgery and a back operation to her account on the popular social networking site. One showed the operating assistant holding indeterminate parts of the patient’s body. The chief of neurosurgery…
Medical privacy law fails to stop snooping
Clark Kauffman has an article in the Des Moines Register about medical snooping and HIPAA violations in Iowa that makes for an interesting, if unsurprising, read: When Jill went to her doctor two years ago for an operation on her uterus, she didn’t expect that details of her problem would later appear in the hometown…