credit monitoring news from FierceHealthIT

Authorities are investigating the theft of patient information from Johns Hopkins Hospital, possibly by a former employee. The theft appears to have been part of a scheme to make fraudulent Virginia Read more...

Hospital chain Tenet Healthcare has notified 37,000 patients that their personal information may have been compromised. The 37,000 patients were drawn from more than 100 facilities, including Read more...

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) is recovering this week from a public relations storm which blew up when it was discovered that patient-specific information was online and freely available. The data, which included information on 80 patients, was first posted online in 2005, when a faculty member made a presentation on integrating multimedia into medical records. As part of the presentation, the now ex-faculty member had posted screen shots of the e-radiology …

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It was a near miss this past week for a unit of WellPoint, one of the largest insurers in the United States. Early last week, WellPoint's Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield announced that it had lost medical and personal data on 75,000 members. The data had been lost when an unencrypted CD was sent to mental health benefits manager Magellan Behavioral Services by Health Data Management Solutions, and lost in transit somehow. As part of its public mea culpa, Empire had announced …

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Two healthcare organizations are taking a public beating over info security breaches that exposed patient data--and one of them may be on the hook for huge legal penalties. The Akron Children's Hospital publicly admitted last week that an intruder had gained access to patient and charitable donor information. Around Labor Day, the hospital learned that German intruders had accessed information concerning about 200,000 patients. The data included Social Security numbers, bank account …

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