HIPAA Blog

[ Monday, October 05, 2009 ]

 

70,000,000 Records; Is That a Lot? The National Archives hosts a database that allows veterans to request copies of their medical records and discharge data. One of the hard drives went out, so the Archives sent it to the contractor to fix. The contractor couldn't fix, so it sent it to another contractor to recycle. Unfortunately, nobody scrubbed the data off of the drive, which may hold medical information and social security numbers for up to 70 million people. After all of the Stimulus Bill and Healthcare Reform talk of billions and trillions of dollars, I'm a little dazed, but it still seems like 70 million is a lot of folks. Of course, so far there's no indication that the information actually fell into the wrong hands, nor is there proof of just how much information was out there (tags like "up to" or "as many as" are pretty much red herrings), and the last time the VA had a big data breach, nothing came of it. But still, not something you want to see.

Jeff [1:50 PM]

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