Liberty Resources

An employee's personal laptop computer that contained the unencrypted electronic protected health information (ePHI) of 3,183 individuals was stolen from his vehicle. The ePHI involved in the breach included consumer names, identification numbers, diagnosis codes, base service unit numbers, service start and end dates, service names, procedure codes, service location identifiers, units authorized, units utilized, units cost, total authorization amounts, total utilized amounts, authorization dates, funding sources, provider names, and master provider index numbers. The CE timely notified all affected individuals, the media, and HHS, and offered assistance to consumers who wished to place fraud alerts on their consumer credit files. Following the breach, the CE created and implemented a new policy and procedure to improve safeguards. This policy prohibits downloading any PHI to a home computer or portable device, prohibits forwarding emails containing PHI to a personal account, cloud service, or unauthorized user, and requires full-disk encryption of agency laptops. OCR obtained assurances that the CE implemented the corrective action listed above. \ \ \