Stolen laptop puts 12,500 patients’ data at risk
Shands HealthCare has recently announced about 12,500 of their patients that their private medical data has been stolen in January, along with the laptop that contained the personal details. As it almost always happens in the case of hardware storing sensitive records, the laptop wasn’t encrypted in any way.
The stolen info contains names, addresses, medical record numbers and medical procedure codes of the patients, as well as the Social Security numbers of about 650 people. Luckily, up to know, there is no evidence of any misuse of the data, and we should keep hoping that the thief or thieves just needed the notebook to sell it or for personal use…
At least some measures have been taken: training for the employees and system-wide encryption policy to prevent such data breaches in the future. And of course, there’s protection for those affected, eligible for 12 months of free credit monitoring.
Let’s hope the new system works, as according to Gainesville.com, security breaches involving large amounts of patient data being exposed are some what of a recurring habit at Shands.
April 9th, 2010 at 6:03 pm
[...] said they could not determine if personally identifiable information (PII) was lost in cases of missing laptops. A few months later, this number increased to 59%. In yesterday’s blog post, we mentioned the [...]