The CE’s employee removed protected health information of 1,562 patients from the CE’s premises over a period of 18 months in order to commit identity theft. The types of PHI involved in the breach included names, addresses, dates of birth, and social Security numbers. The CE notified affected individuals, HHS, and the media about the breach. It offered a year of credit monitoring to those affected. Following the breach, the CE terminated the employee and initiated an auditing program to automatically detect excessive accesses to PHI on its electronic health record system. OCR’s investigation confirmed that the appropriate notifications were made and that corrective actions steps were taken.
