 FACEBOOK |
 TWITTER |
|
SHARE
|
Have a question or a privacy issue that you'd like us to investigate ? Send an to our editors with your comments.
Just when you think it’s safe to provide your Social Security number on your doctor’s intake forms, another wave of medical data breaches crashes over our hopeful heads and reminds us that less (personal detail) is more.
Read on to learn which medical centers are affected now — and about two new “medical data breach” lawsuits against a Canadian hospital and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Read More
It’s a question worth asking your healthcare provider: are you doing the bare minimum to meet federal HIPAA standards or are you actually using common sense to protect my sensitive medical information?
That’s the concern after another data breach rocked Oregon Health & Science University. It reported on March 25 that a surgeon’s unencrypted laptop was stolen from a vacation rental home in Hawaii. The stolen laptop contained medical record numbers, types and dates of surgeries, names of surgeons of 4,022 patients, and (worst of all) the Social Security numbers for at least 17 confirmed patients.
Click to find out what other data breaches have rocked other healthcare facilities in 2013 — and why one security firm calls the low rate of hacking during the past few years merely “the calm before the storm” when it comes to our protected health information.
The ITRC has recently put together a survey on www.idtheftcenter.org attempting to find out what consumers know about medical identity theft. Click to find out more about the growing threat of medical identity fraud and how you can respond to this time-sensitive survey! Read More
The Department of Health and Human Services announced a settlement with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee after the company’s inadequate security measures allowed 57 unencrypted hard drives containing private health information to be stolen from a medical facility.
The unencrypted hard drives contained the protected health information of over one million individuals, including member names, Social Security numbers, diagnosis codes, dates of birth, and health plan identification numbers. Read More
The February issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association says there were more than 3,600 cases of physician and patient medical identity reported to the Federal Trade Commission in 2009. Read More
More than 3.5% of the U.S. population has had their personal health information (PHI) compromised. In the first half of 2011 alone, more than five million medical records have become lost or mishandled — that’s 5,000,000 in six months! Due to such egregious medical data breaches, some “patients will put off seeking treatment, as they are concerned about the unintended consequences suffered when their PHI may become compromised, ” according to this HuffPost Tech article. Read More
An eye-opening Associated Press article suggests that even the most well-designed online medical systems are not safe. Several experts point out that “the human element is the weakest link” when it comes to having our Social Security numbers and medical histories online. The article interviews those who have been affected by medical data breaches and now worry that hackers may have spotted their information online and tagged them for future financial scams. One of the victims in the AP article here says the prospect of all health records going electronic — which federal law mandates should happen by 2014 — “scares the living hell out of me.” Read More
Consumers are usually surprised to find out how far reaching identity theft can be. It can affect many different parts of a victim’s life. One growing form is medical identity theft, which is often difficult to deal with due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and other privacy laws. Even within the category of medical identity theft, there are multiple forms of the crime. Read on for some basic information on one form of medical identity theft called financial medical identity theft, and also the process for cleaning up the mess. Read More
topics
TWEET
Print
email