Medical records of 300,000 Californian's sat unsecured on internet

[Liberal_in_LA]

New data spill shows risk of online health records

Until recently, medical files belonging to nearly 300,000 Californians sat unsecured on the Internet for the entire world to see.

There were insurance forms, Social Security numbers and doctors' notes. Among the files were summaries that spelled out, in painstaking detail, a trucker's crushed fingers, a maintenance worker's broken ribs and one man's bout with sexual dysfunction.

At a time of mounting computer hacking threats, the incident offers an alarming glimpse at privacy risks as the nation moves steadily into an era in which every American's sensitive medical information will be digitized.

------------------------------------

Southern California Medical-Legal Consultants, which represents doctors and hospitals seeking payment from patients receiving workers' compensation, put the records on a website that it believed only employees could use, owner Joel Hecht says.

-------------------

The data were "available to anyone in the world with half a brain and access to Google," Titus says.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/08/21/national/a050115D29.DTL#ixzz1Vo37KpHz

[LaurenG]

1. Oh that just sucks so terribly.

I cannot fathom the sh** storm this will be or the fines. :wow:

[Horse with no Name]

4. What is really disturbing is that these are workers comp claims

Unsecured WC claims that are available simply by Google...open to every database in the world...:tinfoilhat:

[Bryan Buchan]

2. I see this kind of thing often...

...I have worked in the electronic document management world for years and you would be surprised at what you see. Often I find a client thinking they have saved something to their "internal network" when they have saved it to a folder externally exposed in one way or another, it stems from poor IT practices/standards, little or no investment in a proper secure document repository (like OnBase which is my personal fav, just saying), or plain ignorance/poor training. Personally I think electronic repositories should be mandatory and audited & regulated more than they are today. We would not have as many of these issues.

I personally think our National 'entitlement' systems honestly need an HUGE overhaul, and would result in exponential savings over time, savings so large I think you could advocate, as Obama has, to transform our way of handling medical administrative costs and that alone would make a HUGE dent in costs to the tax payer, and electronic document policies and management would be at the forefront of this transformation. I don't think there has been much momentum at least as much as I would like to see. If we leave this responsibility to private corporations, insurance companies, and third party "consultants" standards of security are often blurred and overlooked, and at times just ignored.

[Horse with no Name]

3. Mine were on a computer that was stolen out of the backseat

of someone's personal vehicle parked at a local mall. And to make it more personal, in the area that I live. I got a letter stating I needed to monitor my insurance EOB's to make sure that nobody was using my insurance information and to monitor my credit reports to make sure nobody was using my financial information.
The entire responsibility fell on me...to monitor my medical records, to monitor my credit reports...everything.

There are major issues with this...of which very few will be adequately addressed.