Sutter Health Medical Records Compromised By Computer Theft

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- A Northern California physicians network says a computer stolen last month contains personal information on more than 4 million patients dating back to 1995.

Information on another 943,000 patients also includes medical record numbers, dates of services and a description of medical diagnoses and procedures.

Officials at the Sacramento-based not-for-profit network say the data did not include patient financial records, Social Security numbers, health plan identification numbers or medical records.

Affected patients are being notified by mail if their information was compromised.

Sutter says it's speeding up efforts to encrypt all its computers, but the stolen desktop computer's data was not encrypted.

Comments

[M A Ross]

05:31 PM on 11/17/2011

The story also didn't mention that a lot of other computer related objects were taken: monitors, printers, etc. and that windows were broken to get all this stuff.

This tells me that the person who stole the laptop proabably didn't do it for the information on the hard drive. They probably did it for a quick cash fix.

[Eris23]

03:50 PM on 11/17/2011

Headline: "Sutter Health Medical Records Compromised By Computer Theft"

Article: "Officials at the Sacramento-based not-for-profit network say the data did not include patient financial records, Social Security numbers, health plan identification numbers or medical records."

So, which is it HP?

"Sutter says it's speeding up efforts to encrypt all its computers, but the stolen desktop computer's data was not encrypted."

It's hardly something that has to be a slow or complicated process.

[M A Ross]

05:38 PM on 11/17/2011

The silly thing is that the information on the hard drive (medical record numbers, dates of services and a description of medical diagnoses and procedures.) are only of interest to the hospital, insurance companies and the patients.

Can't do much else with it.

[Tom95134]

09:42 PM on 11/17/2011

Sutter Health is one of the slowest organizations to move to a fully electronic patient records system. One of the problems is that over the past 10~15 years Sutter has been on an acquisition binge and many of these organizations were still paper based.

[Eris23]

10:17 AM on 11/18/2011

For the machines they do have though, encrypting the hard drive shouldn't be a time consuming process.

[MikeyJaii]

11:55 AM on 11/17/2011

This whole nation needs a complete upgrade........

[onlyindependent]

11:44 AM on 11/17/2011

this must be the fault of george bush.

[Eris23]

03:54 PM on 11/17/2011

This is why the right-wing has no successful comedians. :)

[lisa26hd]

11:12 AM on 11/17/2011

They think it's not that bad because SSNs or financial data was not on the computer. What about personal health data.

[Steven Travis]

10:37 AM on 11/17/2011

Why was all this data on an unencrypted drive? With so much data in it was it not in a secured location? How was it backed up? Sounds to me like HIPPA wasn't being followed all that closely (I'm shocked I tell you, shocked)