Thomas qaagree to $750k settlement for HIPAA violations. These days it is very often that we heard about the hospital or medical practice was fined by the Health and the Human Service(HHS) due to the breach of the patient data. The security breaches of HIPAA mainly concerned with bad IT system design, bad user behavior, bad policies and bad operations. The US department of Health and Human Services(HHS) office for civil rights is trying to enforce HIPAA rules on hospital or medical practices to protect the patient data. There was a hospital in the Texas called Thomas, that was fined with an amount of $75000 due to the two breaches that were happened at the hospital. With these two breaches total 81 patients were suffered. The breaches were …show more content…
The HHS was conducting investigation on the clinic about these complaints from the patients. The hospital system also moved all its clinics to the new building called the stratus building. They also replaced all the systems with the new systems that support for the Cerner live. One of the contractors from the IT deployed the new computer to the clinic and he pick up the old computer from the clinic and come to the office and put the computer on the shelf where the junk computer was placed. The contractor forgot to fill up the disposal instructions for the computer. The student interns already requested the environmental services to pick up the old computers from the shelf. The environmental services person pick up all computers on the shelf along with the computer from the clinic. This computer contained the medical data of the patient relating to 76 patients. The environmental services had contract with the third party. They sold all this junk computers to the third party with some cost. This time also they sell all their junk to the third party. This time the breach was occurred due to the improper disposal of the hardware and the negligence of the IT employee. With this second breach of the HIPAA violation the HHS imposed $50k fine on the clinic and the hospital administration fired the employee and HHS imposed a fine of $10k on the