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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
We’ve reported extensively on medical data breaches, but a new ABC News investigation has revealed startling information that our “private” medical records are, data breach or no data breach, just not private.
How can this be? 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
Attention, Medicaid recipients in Utah and South Carolina!
If you or a loved one uses Medicaid or either state’s program for children, be sure to urge them to monitor their credit reports, bank accounts, and other areas.
Why? Because those are the key areas hackers could target with the information obtained after a recent theft of personal information of approximately 182,000 beneficiaries of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program in Utah, and another 228,435 Medicaid beneficiaries in South Carolina. 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
A physician network computer has been stolen in California — while the health network says it was in the process of encrypting their computers. This theft compromised the personal information on more than 4 million patients dating back to 1995. 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
Should there be a program to help service members who end up trying to deal with identity theft while being deployed? Perhaps that’s not a bad idea, especially when you watch the video and read the article in this link about a 14-year Army veteran who learned last month there was a warrant out for her arrest. While she was deployed, someone had stolen her identity and charged medical bills, opened several credit cards and a vehicle loan, and taken out a mortgage. Read More
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