While it's tempting to just say that security breaches happen, we at FierceHealthIT are beginning to be a bit knocked back by the volume of major health organization data losses taking place over the past six months. The latest came early last week, when the VA said that it had lost track of data on 1.8 million veterans and doctors. That includes billing information on about 1.3 million doctors nationwide, and Social Security numbers on about 535,000 individuals. The data, which was missing from an Alabama hospital for about three weeks, was located on an external hard drive used to back up an employee's desktop machine.
This isn't the first time the VA has been caught red-faced after a data loss was reported relatively late. Last year, a VA executive and data analyst ended up out of their jobs after it was discovered that they'd failed to reveal the theft of data on 26.5 million vets quickly.
To learn more about the incident:
- read this piece in The Tennessean
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