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Article by Mary Butler. This article was originally published on the Journal of AHIMA website on September 23, 2016 and is republished here with permission. The breach of Olympic athletes’ medical records by Russian hackers this week again demonstrates the vulnerability of protected health information and the extent to which it is viewed as a target by criminals.…
By Emily Mongan for McKnight’s A major Illinois healthcare system will pay $5.55 million to settle allegations of HIPAA noncompliance, marking the largest settlement to date against a single entity, officials said. The allegations against Advocate Health Care Network, which operates 12 acute-care hospitals and more than 400 other sites of care across the state, involve…
By Mac McMillan for Healthcare Informatics Last week I saw two ugly scenarios play out that did nothing positive for healthcare or its mission to protect patient information. The first incident involved escalations of the cyber threats healthcare organizations face. We were introduced to the hacker “The Dark Overlord” who had hacked multiple hospitals and…
By Donald Voltz, MD for Health IT Outcomes Hardly a day goes by without some new revelation of a U.S. IT mess that seems like an endless round of the old radio show joke contest “Can You Top This” except, increasingly, the joke is on us. From nuclear weapons updated with floppy disks to needless medical…
Hacker Takes Credit for Theft of Data on Nearly 10 Million Patients By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee for Data Breach Today A hacker is reportedly selling on the dark web copies of databases stolen from three unidentified U.S. healthcare organizations and one unnamed health insurer containing data on nearly 10 million individuals for prices ranging from…
Prosecutors Alleged Patient Information Used to Seek Drugs By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee for Healthcare Info Security In a rare criminal case involving a HIPAA violation, a federal jury in Ohio has convicted a former respiratory therapist of wrongly obtaining individually identifiable health information. Prosecutors claimed the therapist was using the information for seeking, obtaining or…
By Christopher Moraff for The Daily Beast The feds are fighting to look at millions of private files without a warrant, including those of two transgender men who are taking testosterone. Marlon Jones was arrested for taking legal painkillers, prescribed to him by a doctor, after a double knee replacement. Jones, an assistant fire chief of Utah’s…
By Barry Petchesky for DEADSPIN In late April, the NFL recently informed its players, a Skins athletic trainer’s car was broken into. The thief took a backpack, and inside that backpack was a cache of electronic and paper medical records for thousands of players, including NFL Combine attendees from the last 13 years. That would…
Article by Mary Butler. This article was originally published on the Journal of AHIMA website on May 18, 2016 and is republished here with permission. New York Presbyterian Hospital was slapped with a $2.2 million fine for allowing a network reality show film the death of a trauma patient without seeking permission from the patient’s family. The…
By Mark Wilson for CO.DESIGN Big data can spot things we’d never see coming. But are companies like Google and Amazon responsible for telling us the bad news? “If I’m on a park bench, and I’m next to someone, and I hear them talking about symptoms of cancer, am I obligated to turn around and tell them…