A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry

Did you hear on the news tonight about the - HUGE breach in Anthem Blue Cross - sm

Posted: Feb 05, 2015

medical records on millions of patients? They think the hack was from China. (And to think some MTSOs are/were considering sending work there!) They were saying that they got SS numbers, credit card numbers, and all sorts of personal information that would make it easy for identity theft to occur. They also said that on the black market, medical records bring far more money per record than credit card numbers. They even said during the report that this wasn't a problem back when medical records were paper records.

Of course, it's obviously too late to consider dumping the EMR, but I'm still just a little bit glad this is coming back to bite one of those giant, greedy HMOs right in the butt. I hope they get sued big time. Kharma!

Yep, I saw that and was thinking the same - as you.....

[ In Reply To ..]
As I side note, speaking of China....(not on subject)....my son is teaching English in a remote town in Russia. I regularly send him care boxes. The packages go to New York, then Bejing, China, THEN finally Russia..that is when they make it. About half of the boxes I send him get "lost" somewhere after supposedly sitting in the post office in Bejing forever. Every single time they are intercepted and probably stolen it happens in China. I know, off subject, but I think it would be a BIG mistake for the MTSOs to send medical info to China!!!

Read THIS and the comment - section

[ In Reply To ..]
Interesting!

If brains were dynamite - Just the facts

[ In Reply To ..]
Please get your facts together before taking things out of context and presenting a distorted picture. First, Anthem Blue Cross is not an MTSO. No facility arbitrarily sends patient medical records overseas. If fact, offshore vendors have to be HIPAA compliant with encryption in place before they ever get the contract, their standards are actually pretty high. The breach that you mention was probably an inside job. My employer uses an offshore vendor for transcription. What some people are not getting is that the entire chart is not sent, only the patient name, MRN, date of service and name of provider. SSNs and other PHI is kept on site. All the files are password protected and encrypted.

Then you wouldn't be able to blow your nose. - BC/BS is an HMO. MTSOs work - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
with HMOs in that they transcribe the medical records that HMOs use EVERY SINGLE DAY. Nothing whatsoever was taken out of context here. (And note that the mention of MTSOs was done as an aside - adding that they've been courting China as a potential place to send this work.)

No facility KNOWINGLY sends medical records overseas, unless they already know (wink-wink) that their MTSO offshores. And when they do, all bets are off.

Also, note that the offshore hackers had ENOUGH INFORMATION to be able to hack into the BC/BS system. They can do so because all of these systems are now linked. They have to be, in order for offshoring work to even occur. So what if the patient's actual SSN isn't on what the transcriptionist sees? The transcriptionist's offshore employer has enough of a link with the American company where that work originates that it CAN BE HACKED.

Password protection and encryption means next to nothing these days. At three separate companies where I used to work, do you know what our password was? It was "PASSWORD". Real secure, huh? I also used to work in a facility that was so lazy about the security key-in number for employees, that they simply made it so that employees could punch in any numbers they wanted, and the door would open. This type of thing exists everywhere, and it's that kind of false sense of security that makes American identities such easy targets.

My situation - Just the facts

[ In Reply To ..]
The facility where I work uses an offshore transcription vendor. We work one-on-one with them and do QA on site. We do not send entire patient charts, only the voice files, MRNs and provider names, they are HIPAA compliant and even our e-mail correspondence is encrypted or sent via secure server, they do not have access to our internal records. It is possible that the BC/BS security breach occurred in the US and someone sold the data to an offshore entity. Anyone stupid enough to use PASSWORD to log in deserves to be hacked, enough said. Not all identity theft occurs in third world countries.

North Korea has a university to train people - to be hackers.

[ In Reply To ..]
and are very expert at it.

Off shore vs. on shore is meaningless when it comes to computerized records.

China is our biggest enemy, and if you want to worry about something, they could probably shut down our power grid any time they wanted.

That is YOUR situation only - you cannot

[ In Reply To ..]
speak for everyone. Yours is but one experience. You are not an expert simply because you work at one facility that does things a certain way.

Just the Facts - Give it a rest - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
you don't know everything about everything. You're starting to remind me of Informaticist.

THANK YOU! - (nm)

[ In Reply To ..]
x

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