HIPAA Blog

[ Friday, April 02, 2004 ]

 

More San Francisco Treats: David Lazarus of the San Fran Chronicle is all over the "Transcriptionists in India extorting cash in return for not exposing patient records" stories. As noted below, the earlier event has quite a few twists and turns, particularly regarding the failure of the middleman to pay the Pakistani transcriptionist (who only wanted to get paid for the work she did). Now, it comes to light in this story that an Ohio transcription company was also extorted by employees in Bangalore who threatend to expose patient records. An executive from that company actually testified before California legislators, but didn't tell them about the extortion. He had a good excuse, though: the Indian employees didn't actually have any medical records, the information they had was limited to internal company documents that they had stolen from a managers office they had broken into, the employees were caught and arrested (and they confessed), and they're now in jail in India awaiting trial.

I suspect there are more stories out there; but I also suspect that there are just as many stories about that type of extortion or misuse of PHI by American transcriptionists as by foreign transcriptionists.

Jeff [8:36 AM]

Comments: Post a Comment
http://www.blogger.com/template-edit.g?blogID=3380636 Blogger: HIPAA Blog - Edit your Template