3rd HIPAA Criminal Indictment; Another Insider Job

Now Available:

Featured Resources:

On February 15, Leslie A. Howell, from Oklahoma City, OK, was indicted for violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 as part of an identity theft scheme.

"From June to August 2007, Howell disclosed "personally identifiable health information” to two people, knowing they would use it to commit "access device fraud” and identity theft, according to the indictment. Bob Troester, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma, said the indictment was the first in the district for violating the medical privacy law. Troester said the records came from a counseling center. He declined to say which one. Howell is accused of providing more than 100 patient files to two people whom Troester declined to identify. If convicted, Howell faces as many as 10 years in prison and a fine of as much as $250,000. Howell has not been arraigned."

It would seem to point to poor controls and safeguards within the counseling center.

I believe incidents such as this should be automatic triggers for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to perform a HIPAA compliance audit.

This is the third case I know of where HIPAA has been used to pursue criminal charges. I have blogged about the other instances several times, such as here and here.

Thanks, Alec, for sending me this story! :)

Categories

Rebecca Herold's Bio:

Rebecca Herold, CISSP, CIPP, CISM, CISA, FLMI, has been providing information security, privacy and regulatory assistance and services to organizations from a wide range of industries for the past two decades. Rebecca was instrumental in building the information security and privacy program while at Principal Financial Group, which was awarded the CSI Information Security Program of the Year Award in 1998. IT Security ranked Rebecca as one of the top 59 IT security influencers, and Computerworld put Rebecca their list of the world's best privacy experts and on their list of the best privacy consulting firms in both 2007 and 2008. Rebecca has been CPO for two consulting organizations, and has had her own information privacy, security and compliance business since 2004. Rebecca has written chapters for several books, dozens of articles, and has been writing a monthly privacy column for the CSI Alert newsletter since the beginning of 2001, and is working on her 13th book. Some of her other books include The Privacy Papers, Managing an Information Security and Privacy Awareness and Training Program, The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter (Realtime Publishers), The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL (Realtime Publishers), and The Practical Guide to HIPAA Privacy and Security Compliance. In addition, Rebecca is the leader of The Realtime IT Compliance Community where she posts to her IT Compliance weblog. You can contact Rebecca at: rebecca_herold@realtimepublishers.net.

Now Available:

Featured Resources:

Realtime Communities

Newsletter

Monthly Archives

RSS

Ask the Expert