HIPAA Blog

[ Tuesday, January 21, 2025 ]

 

Texas Health and Human Services Commission Suffers HIPAA Breach: If you haven't figured it out yet, anyone with health data is potentially susceptible to a data breach, and that includes governmental entities.  The Texas Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees health and welfare programs in the state (including state Medicaid), reported recently that in November 2024, bad employees at the agency improperly accessed information of about 61,000 individuals.  The employees have been fired and law enforcement authorities are investigating.  

It is not clear if HHSC has reported the incident to OCR; it may be that the breach is not a HIPAA breach at all, but rather a breach of SNAP (i.e., food stamp) card information. That may make sense, if the bad employees were looking to skim funds off of the accounts of food stamp recipients (which, of course, changes "bad" to something much worse -- stealing from the poorest folks should get you a special circle of hell or something).


Jeff [10:05 AM]

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