Privacy/Security

North Carolina-based Raleigh Orthopaedic Clinic has notified approximately 17,300 patients that x-ray films belonging to them and taken prior to 2008 may have been provided to a third-party vendor, which sold the films to an Ohio-based recycling company that harvested the silver from the X-rays.

The University of Rochester Medical Center has sent letters to a group of 537 former orthopaedic patients, alerting them that a resident physician misplaced a USB computer flash drive that carried protected health information.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Office for the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) will host a listening session on May 3 to discuss the increase in code levels billed for some Medicare services, and appropriate coding in an increasingly electronic environment.

In response to heightened awareness and concerns about cyber threats, attacks and incidents, the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) announced today new guidance for healthcare organizations wanting to assess the state of their cybersecurity preparedness. The guidance identifies an appropriate subset of controls within the HITRUST Common Security Framework (CSF) that are most directly related to detecting and thwarting cyber-related breaches and allows organizations to assess against the cyber-specific controls and receive a snapshot of their cyber capabilities and readiness.

The University of Connecticut Health Center has acknowledged that a former employee inappropriately accessed records of approximately 1,400 patients, which included names, addresses, dates of birth, and in some cases, Social Security numbers. The Health Center became aware of the privacy breach on January 7, 2013.