Employee snooping cause of breach at Va. health system

Laura Pedulli | | Health Exec | Cybersecurity

Hundreds of patients at Riverside Health System in Newport News, Va., will receive free credit monitoring services after a random audit determined that an employee had inappropriately accessed EMR data.

Follow the audit, an investigation by Riverside's compliance department uncovered the inappropriate access of 919 medical records spanning September 2009 through October 2013. Information compromised included patients' Social Security numbers, a summary of the patient history and other EMR information, according to the health system.

The employee at fault has since been terminated.

"We have a robust compliance program and ongoing monitoring in place, and that's how we were able to identify this breach," Riverside Health System Spokesperson Peter Glagola said. "We are looking at ways to improve our monitoring program with more automatic flags to protect our patients."

Laura Pedulli

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