Atlanta Hospital Sues Exec Over Allegedly Stolen Health Data

In most cases of hospital data theft, you usually learn that a laptop was stolen or a PC hacked. But in this case, a hospital is claiming that one of its executives stole a wide array of data from the facility, according to the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

In a complaint filed last week in Atlanta federal court, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta asserts that corporate audit advisor Sharon McCray stole a boatload of proprietary information. The list of compromised data includes PHI of children, DEA numbers, health provider license numbers for over 500 healthcare providers, financial information and more, the newspaper reports.

According to the Children’s complaint, McCray announced her resignation on October 16th, then on the 18th, began e-mailing the information to herself using a personal account. On the 21st, Children’s cut off her access to her corporate e-mail account, and the next day she was fired.

Not surprisingly, Children’s has demanded that McCray return the information, but as of the date of the filing, McCray had neither returned or destroyed the data nor permitted Children’s to inspect her personal computer, the hospital says. Children’s is asking a federal judge to force McCray to give back the information.

According to IT security firm Redspin, nearly 60 percent of the PHI breaches reported to HHS under notification rules involved a business associate, and 67 percent were the result of theft or loss. In other words, theft by an executive with the facility — if that is indeed what happened — is still an unusual occurrence.

But given the high commercial value of the PHI and medical practitioner data, I wouldn’t be surprised if hospital execs were tempted into theft. Hospitals are just going to have to monitor execs as closely they do front-line employees.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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