From the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office: The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued NHS Surrey with a monetary penalty of £200,000 after more than 3,000 patient records were found on a second hand computer bought through an online auction site. The sensitive information was inadvertently left on the computer and sold by a data destruction company employed…
Search Results for: patient
Health-related web searches could be tracked, researchers warn
A research letter in JAMA is getting some attention in the news: New research has raised alarm about threats to privacy posed by patients searching for health-related information on the internet. Marco Huesch, a researcher at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, searched for “depression,” “herpes” and “cancer” on various health-related websites and observed…
UK: The cancer diagnosis letter found in a car park, voicemails to the wrong person and a gate-crashed consultation: Hospital data breaches up 20% in a year
Madlen Davies reports: Hospitals have seen the number of confidentiality breaches and losses of patient data rise by a fifth over the past year, with thousands of such incidents reported, a Pulse investigation reveals. Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from 55 hospital trusts who were able to provide comparable year-on-year statistics show…
Shining some light on medical privacy and security breaches in California; over 13,000 reported in 3+ years
The California Department of Public Health recently added a breach report to its web site involving California Hospital Medical Center – LA. According to their report of November 2010, in May 2010, the police department discovered face sheets with 102 patients’ names, financial, insurance, and diagnostic information in the trunk of a patient accounts representative’s…
Breach-related lawsuit against Adventist Health dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction
Law360 reports that Adventist Hospital System/Sunbelt Inc. succeeded in getting a federal court to dismiss a potential class action lawsuit against it. As noted previously on this blog, the lawsuit stemmed from employees at Florida Hospital Celebration selling patient information. Adventist had moved to dismiss Richard Faircloth’s lawsuit on grounds that the federal court lacked…
Insider threat, redux
Tampa Bay Times reports: Federal authorities say employees at James A. Haley VA Medical Center and Tampa General Hospital stole patients’ identities in tax fraud schemes. Haley employee David F. Lewis is accused of taking the names and Social Security numbers of dozens of hospital patients and selling the information to people who used it to…