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Medicare Compliance & Reimbursement

Industry Notes:

Tricare HIPAA Breach Could Affect 4.9 Million Patients

Published on Sun Sep 18, 2011

Recent spotlights on HIPAA breaches have shown just how many people can be impacted by one privacy slip-up, and the latest incident underscores that point. Tricare, the massive U.S. military insurer, announced last week that backup tapes from an electronic health care record went missing while in the possession of a contractor, putting about 4.9 million San Antonio-area military clinic and hospital patients at risk of a privacy breach. According to the statement, the information on the tapes included patient data from 1992 through Sept. 7, 2011, and "may include Social Security numbers, addresses and phone numbers, and some personal health data such as clinical notes, laboratory tests, and prescriptions." However, the tapes contained no financial data. Despite the sensitive information stored on the missing tapes, the government ranks the risk of harm to patients as low because anyone attempting to access the data would have to be proficient in [...]
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