As health data breaches continue to be commonplace in the healthcare industry, it is important to recognize the various reasons for their occurrence. Although theft and hacking are commonly reported on, there are also many instances of health data breaches caused by human error. Such was the case for Affinity Health Plan (AHP) when misprinted letters were sent to the provider’s beneficiaries.
The breach, which was discovered on August 14, 2015, involved a misprinted mailing from AHP. According to the data breach notification letter AHP sent to potentially affected individuals, letters regarding Child Health Plus renewals inadvertently contained other children’s information.
At the beginning of August, AHP members received reminder letters for renewing Child Health Plus for their children. Printed on the back of those letters was a letter in a different language addressed to a different Affinity member. This led to a number of Affinity members’ information being shared with other Affinity members.
“Due to a printing error that we discovered on Friday, August 14, 2015, the back of the letter you received included a renewal reminder in another language that was mistakenly addressed to a different Affinity member,” the letter said. “As a result of this error, another Affinity member received a letter mistakenly addressed to you on the back of their August 4, 2015 letter.”
According to AHP, the information disclosed in this misprint included the children’s names, addresses, and AHP identification numbers. However, AHP reports that no child’s health information was disclosed, nor were Social Security numbers or any billing information. AHP did not disclose in its notification letter how many individuals were affected by the breach. For the full article click here
from health IT caucus http://ift.tt/1LxT9IB
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment