Posted on 07/29/2010 11:03:11 PM PDT by Gondring
A laptop computer with health and personal information on 21,000 patients was stolen from an office at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia in June.
The patients whose unencrypted records were on the password-protected laptop were notified last Friday of the theft in a letter from hospital president Thomas J. Lewis, who offered identity-theft monitoring and protection.
[...]
The breach at Jefferson is part of a national problem, experts say.
A federal database has documented 121 such lapses nationwide since September 2009, showing that medical or financial information had been exposed for more than five million people.
[...]
Perhaps as a result, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has increased penalties for violations of patient privacy [...]
Still, such breaches occur every week.
[...]
"We are seeing this all the time," said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy at the California-based Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.
[...]
The Jefferson records were for every patient admitted to the hospital from March 9 to June 9 and Aug. 1 to Nov. 1, 2008.
[...]
Lewis, the hospital's president, said the hospital's internal investigation took time to correctly identify the patients and find the right firm to protect their identity.
He said that was why patients were not notified of the June 14 theft until Tuesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at philly.com ...
Yeah, not like people are smart enough to make their own decisions. Better to leave them out there vulnerable, with no idea they are.
And both private and public sectors want us to entrust them with more and more!
Massive identity fraud could be a form of terrorism, where the thieves are seeking to create widespread trouble rather than get personal financial gain.
There’s no way that amount of critical data should be on a laptop or workstation.
If anything the laptop should just be a portal to a server where they can then use/manipulate the data. That way when the Laptop is stolen they just change passwords, etc.
or they can encrypt the hard drive. but no thats too easy
Disk encryption is a requirement these days.
At least one person at the hospital is going to lose their job.
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