Saint Francis Hospital

On January 15, 2018, Saint Francis Hospital, the covered entity (“CE”), discovered that a new custodian had inadvertently disposed of some bins containing protected health information (PHI) in the regular trash, potentially exposing the names, dates of birth, addresses, social security numbers, clinical and payment information of 1,388 individuals. The CE provided timely breach notification to HHS, to the affected individuals and to the media. At the time of the breach and currently, the CE trained its employees on the proper disposal of PHI. In its response to the breach, the CE retrained its employees and the custodial company, and implemented additional safeguards to prevent the improper disposal of PHI in the future. OCR obtained assurances that the CE implemented the corrective actions listed above.