This is unusual. A former employee out to embarrass her employer, Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital, allegedly sent letters to patients who had received electroshock therapy to tell them that the therapy had failed and that they should get frontal lobotomies. And according to a report by Rummana Hussain of the Chicago Sun-Times, some of the letters included…
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Eastern Health privacy breach triggers lawsuit
CBC News reports that one lawyer has filed potential class action lawsuits against both Western Health Authority and Eastern Health Authority in the wake of privacy breaches involving improper employee access or snooping in patients’ records: St. John’s lawyer Bob Buckingham is leading class action lawsuits against two health authorities. (CBC) Eastern Health disclosed in…
More details on the Florida Hospital breach
As I was looking for more media coverage on the Florida Hospital breach discussed earlier today, I was surprised to come across a news report from October 2011 that I had missed. I wasn’t surprised that I had missed the news story, but I was surprised by what it claimed. WFTV, which has been all…
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center reports second HIPAA breach in three months
The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which reported in June that a laptop stolen from a doctor’s home in April held data on 30,000 patients, has reported yet another breach. KTRK in Houston reports that an unencrypted flash drive containing protected health information was lost on an employee shuttle bus on July 13. In…
Privacy laws complicate exchange data-sharing: Pritts
Rich Daly reports: Strong state privacy laws continue to complicate health information exchanges’ efforts to ease health-data sharing, a senior federal health technology official said Monday. And a key to overcoming such obstacles may be greater use of meta tags. Joy Pritts, chief privacy officer in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information…
Phlebotomist sentenced for role in ID theft/fraud scheme
The Associated Press is reporting that Fairon Williams, a phlebotomist from Norfolk, Virginia, was sentenced to two years in prison. Williams had pleaded guilty in federal court on May 1 to engaging in aggravated identity theft while working in an unnamed medical office. Two years was the maximum mandatory sentence she faced. The AP report does…