What Can Brown Do For You?
Privacy advocates wring their hands over medical records in the electronic ether, but a more frequent culprit of compromised records is UPS.
The Associated Press reported that the medical records of 28 Central Florida Regional Hospital patients were sold last month at a Salt Lake City surplus store for about $20. The records were sold to a local school teacher looking for scrap paper for her fourth-grade class. The records contained addresses, Social Security numbers, medical histories, phone numbers and insurance information.
The hospital shipped the records via UPS to a Las Vegas company for a Medicare audit. One of the boxes was lost and ended up in a Utah surplus store for sale, according to the A.P. The confusing part is the package containing the records had a document indicating it was sold because the shipping company could not deliver it or find its owner.
Shipping companies often sell off packages that cannot be delivered. The A.P. reported that a UPS spokesman said his company keeps packages for at least three months before liquidating them.
Did UPS loss the box label, so the package floated in their system before being sold to the surplus store? Last year a CD-ROM with thousands of medical records was “lost” by UPS. It turned up a few weeks later when a private citizen realized he had received the wrong disk and returned it.
It doesn’t take data flowing on the information superhighway to get lost or stolen. A majority of fraud and data loss in financial services still happens the old fashion way, and it isn’t any different in healthcare.
Tags: EHR, EMR, Healthcare+PR, Healthcare+Privacy, Medical+PR, Medical+Records, Online+PR
Posted by Shawn Whalen on March 12, 2008 at 9:33 AM
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