Health Data

Rash of Breaches Coincides With Health Privacy & Security Week

George Lauer of iHealthBeat reports: The timing couldn’t have been better — or worse, depending on your perspective. April 13 through 19 was Health Information Privacy and Security Week. Started five years ago by the American Health Information Management Association, the week’s intent is to schedule events and publicity to raise public and professional...

UK: Medical records left on public transport

CONFIDENTIAL medical details of more than 1,000 patients have been exposed after a hospital employee left them on public transport. The Addenbrooke’s Hospital worker lost a spreadsheet stored on a USB memory stick along with a printed copy of 1,300 patient names and test records. The details include the dates and types of tests...

Hong Kong officials lose personal data on 700 troubled children

Hong Kong – Medical data on almost 700 Hong Kong children and teenagers with social and developmental problems have been lost, the territory’s government admitted Friday. The records were held on a memory card which was stolen from an unlocked room at a Child Assessment Centre in the city’s Tuen Mun district, the government’s...

Florida man found guilty in Santa Rosa identity theft case

Kris Wernowsky reports in the Pensacola News Journal: A former Santa Rosa Medical Center nurse took the stand Thursday and admitted that he stole a patient’s identity and used it to get thousands of dollars to purchase vehicles. “It’s wrong, what I did,” Gary Lamar Holt said during his testimony. “I didn’t mean to...

Health-care company, state deny personal data was at risk

Scott Bauer reports: The security of a database containing sensitive information about 240,000 senior citizens and disabled people in Wisconsin was never breached or at risk, the chief executive of the company that controls the data said Thursday. A top official with the state Department of Health and Family Services also sought to assure...

Security hole in Harmony's SAMS program exposed personal and health information on Wisconsin seniors and disabled

  Scott Bauer of the Associated Press reports that a computer program run by Harmony Information Systems has a significant security hole that resulted in exposure of personal and medical information on Wisconsin seniors and disabled people. The program in question, Harmony’s Social Assistance Management Systems program, is used by Wisconsin to compile nutrition...

'Hold instructor of student nurse in rectum scandal accountable'

From ABS-CBN, more on the scandal reported on this site previously: The chair of the Technical Committee on Nursing Education of Commission on Higher Education (CHED) suggested to revoke the license of the Clinical Instructor (CI) of the student nurse who took a cell phone video of the rectum operation in Vicente Sotto Memorial...

Bank of Ireland loses thousands of customer records

Out-Law.com reports: Four laptops containing personal details of 10,000 people have been stolen from the Bank of Ireland (BOI). The Data Protection Commissioner in Ireland is investigating the thefts. Data on the four laptops is not thought to have been encrypted, and BOI will now begin a process of encryption of data on its...

TX: Social Security Numbers Exposed On Hospital Bills

Lauren Grover reports in the Tyler Morning Telegraph: Some 2,000 medical bills were mailed around East Texas last week with patients’ Social Security numbers visible on the envelope after a technical glitch skewed billing at the collection agency used by the University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler. Chief Operating Officer Rob Marshall...