ProPublica has been examining the ways in which patient privacy is protected or breached. We’ve previously written about how well hospitals have complied with the federal patient privacy law, known as HIPAA, and how a real-life medical series filmed a man’s death without his family’s permission.
Since October 2009, health care providers and organizations (including third parties that do business with them) have reported more than 1,140 large health data breaches to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights, affecting upwards of 41 million people. As these breaches proliferate, however, federal overseers have seldom penalized the health care organizations responsible for safeguarding this data, our review shows.
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