Posts Tagged ‘medical privacy’

A Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association employee broke protocol by transferring the names, addresses, Social Security numbers and provider identification numbers of about 800,000 doctors to his personal laptop.

Unfortunately, his computer was stolen from his car this past August but, as of yet, there haven’t been any signs of identity theft.

The affected physicians have been informed and, thankfully, no patient information was included in the database.

A representative for the health insurance company was quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying: “At this point, we have no evidence that the data was misused.  We think this was a random criminal act. Regardless, we take these kinds of breaches extremely seriously and so we are alerting all doctors in the database.”

In an attempt to offset any negative consequences associated with the theft of the laptop, the Blue Cross association is offering crediting monitoring services to the individuals whose Social Security information was exposed.

It goes without saying that this is really a worst-case scenario, since so many could be affected by this breach and the laptop hasn’t been recovered.  This is an unfortunate example of how the mistakes of a single person could after thousands of people. 

In a situation like this, using a program like Computrace would be helpful since sensitive data can be deleted remotely and the Theft Recovery Team will work with local police to try to find the stolen laptop – and the thief who stole it. And once the they have the laptop back, Computrace can be used to help determine if files were accessed post-theft. While it would still be important to be vigilant for signs of identity theft, the risk would be considerably lower.

There are many types of information that people don’t want to share with the world but someone’s personal medical history is probably at the top of that list.  The reasons we visit the doctor’s office can vary from mundane to downright embarrassing (or even scary), so it’s no surprise that many patients really depend on the rules surrounding confidentiality to protect this very private information.

Unfortunately, medical students may not realize the importance of patient privacy, which is evidenced by the fact that we’ve started seeing disclosures more and more through the use of social networking tools and modern technology.  For example, one surgeon found the fact that his patient had the words “hot rod” tattooed on his genitals so funny that he took a picture and shared it with his colleagues. 

As CNN reports, 60% of medical schools “have had students post inappropriate or unprofessional information on the Web.”  While most of this information pertained to their own behavior, 13% of them shared content that violated patient privacy.  Incredibly, there were even instances when some students were so descriptive that their patients were identifiable. 

Incredibly, only 38% of the affected schools had policies in effect to deal with inappropriate sharing on the internet but, at least, 11% of the remaining schools were working on creating guidelines. 

This illustrates the fact that many professions have not had to deal with internet security issues on this level but, while some are trying to actively address the issues, the public is at risk in the meantime. 

image: sxu.hu