Ohio mental health agency privacy breach affected 59,000
Dayton Daily News (OH)Jun 30, 2016
The largest breach involved the
In February, the state agency sent out postcards to consumers of mental health services inviting them to participate in a satisfaction survey.
The mother of an adolescent patient who received the postcard contacted the department, concerned that the postcard publicly identified her family as including someone who had sought mental health services, which constitutes personal health information.
The agency then discovered this wasn't the first time the postcards had gone out.
"Apparently the research unit had been sending out (postcards) up to five years," said
No
The federal agency oversees enforcement of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and maintains an online database of breaches affecting more than 500 people.
But information on smaller breaches, which account for 99 percent of HIPAA violations, is harder to find.
The I-Team used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a database of nearly 800 smaller breach investigations of
Read the full investigation in Sunday's
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By the numbers
780: Small privacy law violations investigated in
52: Large breaches in
113,000: Number of individuals impacted by
12: Violations investigated involving
100: Entities with more than one large breach on their record, including
In-depth coverage
The I-Team compiled all the HIPAA violations investigated by the
Search the full database of health care privacy complaints in
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