AUG 22, 2012 12:19pm ET

Cops: ER Employee Sold 760,000 Patient Records

The FBI has arrested a former employee of Florida Hospital Celebration, charging him with accessing 760,000 emergency department records over two years and selling them, WFTV in Orlando reports.

The bureau alleges that Dale Munroe, who registered patients in the emergency department, primarily accessed records of patients who were in an automobile accident from several hospitals across the state, and sold the records to someone who sold them to chiropractors and attorneys.

Patients usually got a solicitation call within a week. The scheme unraveled when one of the calls went to a hospital employee who knew the records were to be private, WFTV reports.

The FBI investigation and resulting discovery of the scope of the breach follows Florida Hospital's original report last year to the HHS Office for Civil Rights of a breach in August 2011 that at the time was believed to have affected 12,784 patients, as the breach currently is displayed on OCR's public Web site of major breaches of protected health information.

Data Security

Consumer Health

EHR

Hospitals

Stimulus

Policy & Regulation

Comments (2)

This represents the flaw in HIPAA. Information is only as secure as the person accessing the data. How is it that an employee has access to the raw data? An employee should be able to input and view the data as per their job description. No one should have access to the raw data and no one should be able to download the data.

Are the chiropractors and attorneys going to be arrested? They should be for receiving stolen property and PHI.

Posted by Gary B | Wednesday, August 22 2012 at 1:29PM ET

Posted by Darrin D | Wednesday, August 22 2012 at 2:30PM ET

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