Prenatal patients who visited certain obstetric clinics operated by UNC Health Care are being notified that some of their protected health information has been disclosed to local health departments by mistake.

Pregnancy Home Risk Screening Forms of Medicaid-eligible patients are sent to local health departments to ensure those individuals are connected with appropriate support services. However, UNC Health Care has discovered that in addition to Medicaid-eligible patients, forms relating to patients who were not eligible for Medicaid were also sent to local health departments. In total, around 1,300 patients have been affected.

The privacy breach affects women who had prenatal appointments at the UNC Maternal-Fetal Medicine at Rex Hospital or the Women’s Clinic at the North Carolina Women’s Hospital between April 2014 and February 2017.

Pregnancy Home Risk Screening Forms contain patients’ names and addresses, race and ethnicity, Social Security numbers, health and mental health histories, details of patients’ HIV status, any sexually transmitted diseases contracted, medical diagnoses related to the pregnancy or past pregnancies, details of drug and alcohol use and whether the patients were smokers.

Patients whose privacy has been violated were informed of the breach by mail on March 20, 2017. Patients have been advised that the health departments that have been sent the information are covered by state and federal laws put in place to protect patient privacy. Those health departments must have appropriate administrative, technical and physical safeguards in place to protect all protected health information that is received and stored.

Consequently, the risk of any sensitive information being used inappropriately is believed to be low, although as a precaution, all individuals affected by the breach have been offered fraud resolution services in case any experience identity theft or fraud as a result of the incident.

To prevent future breaches of this nature from occurring, UNC Health Care has updated its policies and procedures covering patients who complete the Pregnancy Home Risk Screening Form and all staff members have been trained on the new procedures. In future, only forms completed by Medicaid-eligible individuals will be sent to county health departments.

UNC Health Care has requested all county health departments purge any information relating to non-Medicaid-patients from their databases.

The post UNC Health Care Reports Exposure of 1300 Prenatal Patients’ PHI appeared first on HIPAA Journal.

A member of a cleaning crew at the Minneapolis Heart Institute at Abbott Northwestern Hospital accidentally disposed of documents containing PHI with regular trash.

Minneapolis Heart Institute has policies and procedures in place that require all documents containing sensitive patient health information to be securely destroyed in accordance with HIPAA Rules. However, a member of the cleaning team was discovered to have emptied a trash container from a physician’s private office before documents could be securely shredded.

The incident was discovered on January 20, 2017, although not in time for the documents to be recovered and securely destroyed. The documents had been emptied into a bin bag which was placed in a regular recycling dumpster at the hospital.

It is unclear at this stage how many individuals have been impacted, although as a precaution, the Minneapolis Heart Institute is notifying all patients who were part of the physician’s service group between April 17, 2016 and January 17, 2017. Those individuals have been offered credit monitoring and identity theft protection services without charge for a period of 12 months, even though the risk of any PHI being accessed by unauthorized individuals is believed to be very low.

The documents contained PHI including names, addresses, birth dates, medical record numbers, clinical data, and health insurance information. Some health insurers use Social Security numbers as health plan identifiers; therefore, some Social Security numbers may also have been on the documents.

The incident shows that policies and procedures alone will not always prevent breaches of this nature from occurring. However, the action taken following the incident by Allina Health, which operates Abbott Northwestern Hospital, should prevent any further such incidents from occurring in the future.

Allina Health has removed all desk-side recycling bins and has replaced them with locked shredding bins. Now, all documents will be sent for shredding, irrespective of whether they contain sensitive data. An employee education program has also been conducted to advise employees of the need to shred all paperwork and Allina Health’s safeguards policy has also been reinforced, highlighting the importance of the correct disposal of documents.

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Healthcare professionals must have access to the protected health information of patients in order to provide medical care and perform healthcare operations.

Since access to data can be abused by rogue employees, it is essential that controls are put in place to alert healthcare organizations rapidly when improper access occurs. Rapid identification of improper access can greatly reduce the harm caused.

In many cases, improper access is discovered during routine audits of access and application logs. When those audits are conducted on an annual basis, employees may be found to have been improperly accessing patient data for many months.

Last month, Chadron Community Hospital and Health Services in Nevada discovered that a rogue employee had been accessing ePHI without any legitimate work reason for doing so. What makes this incident stand out, is how long access had been allowed to continue before it was discovered.

An investigation conducted by the healthcare provider revealed that the improper access had gone unnoticed for more than 5 years. During that time, the records of more than 700 patients had been accessed by the employee. The report submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights indicates 702 individuals had their privacy violated by the employee.

Chadron Community Hospital and Health Services first learned of the privacy breach on January 3, 2017. The investigation into the employee’s activities showed medical records were first improperly accessed in September 2011 and that HIPAA-violating activity had continued until November 2016. The types of information accessed included names, addresses, dates of birth, demographic information, clinical information such as medical diagnoses, orders and physicians’ notes, some financial data and insurance information. No Social Security numbers are believed to have been viewed.

It is not clear why the employee accessed the information out of curiosity or if data were viewed with malicious intent. The individual is no longer employed by Chadron Community Hospital and Health Services. The dates of access suggest the employee had left the healthcare organization prior to the improper access being discovered.

Insider threats are a major concern for healthcare security staff. A recent Dimensional Research/Preempt survey showed that almost half of IT security professionals are more concerned about internal attacks than external threats. The network perimeter can be secured, although monitoring for improper access by employees can be a challenge.

HIPAA Rules require covered entities to maintain access logs and conduct periodic reviews of those logs to monitor for improper access. HIPAA does not state how often those logs must be checked, although it would be difficult to argue that regular, thorough checks were conducted if an employee was able to evade detection for more than 5 years. Such a long period of improper access is certain to attract the attention of Office for Civil Rights’ investigators.

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