HIPAA Data Breaches

ABC News reports that an unencrypted laptop that went missing from Riverside County Regional Medical Center in December may have contained personal information of nearly 7,900 patients. At first, this new report appeared to be an update of a breach disclosure the center made in June, when they reported notifying 563 patients of a missing laptop that had…

HIPAA Settlement Reached for Dumpster PHI Exposure – HIPAA Journal Under Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) data privacy and security rules, Protected Health Information (PHI) must be secured at all times and when data is no longer required it must be destroyed to prevent accidental exposure. In May 2013, Midwest Women’s Healthcare Specialists…

Here are a few things you can do to avoid a data breach: Encrypt data at rest (on pc’s, usb drives, servers, etc.) If an encrypted device is lost or stolen you do not have to report it as a data breach. Simply password protecting is not enough and the average password on a pc can…