No lull for breaches
There’s no such thing as a quiet week in health IT, it seems. Despite the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, there was plenty of news this week including three data breaches.
The largest of this week’s breaches impacted almost 90,000 patients after a former New York City Health and Hospitals Corp. employee improperly accessed and transmitted files containing protected health information (PHI).
A former employee at HHC Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx sent files with PHI to her personal email account and new work email account. The organization learned of the breach through its information governance and security program that monitors and detects email communications that contain PHI and other confidential information sent from HHC's network without authorization, according to an HHC statement.
PHI at risk includes patient names, addresses, birth dates, telephone numbers, medical record numbers, treatment dates, types of services, limited sensitive health information and some health insurance identification including Social Security numbers.
There was much focus on privacy and security concerns during the recent HIMSS15 conference and it seems those who said 2015 is the year of the healthcare data breach were right on the money. Everyone’s talking about interoperability, but what about the ability to protect and secure that information everyone wants to share?
Beth Walsh
Clinical Innovation + Technology editor
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.