British TV sting reveals medical records for sale in India - mte

According to articles in The Economic Times and The Daily Mail, an undercover investigation by Britain's ITV1 television program "Tonight" has revealed that medical records of UK citizens are available for purchase from Indian black marketeers. Quoting from The Economic Times article:

The modus-operandi employed to procure the records was simple. Chris Rogers, the [television] programme’s presenter, contacted two Indian salesmen through an internet chat room, and posed as a marketing executive keen on buying medical records to sell insurance and medicines.

Rogers bought 116 files with detailed medical records of British patients from the two salesmen, whom the programme named as Jayesh Bagchandnani and Kunal Gargatti, the Daily Mail, a prominent British tabloid, reported on Sunday.

Bagchandnani reportedly said they came from staff at an Indian ‘transcription’ centre where medical records are computerised. Bagchandnani told Rogers: “We can do really good business with these leads. These leads will give you diagnose, entire diagnose of all the India’s top 10 BPO customers, what the customer is facing. There are 17 teams or you can say team managers. The floor managers, they are working as freelancers for me and I am telling them to pull the data for me. They work for me.”

Researchers for the programme then met Gargatti, in Mumbai. “You have the doctor’s name, doctor’s address, doctor’s phone number. Each and every thing here. I have 30,000 files to give you today, right now. I’ve around 140 diseases here. You just tell me which disease you’re looking out for — I can give you anything ,” he told them.

The files procured were of patients of London Clinic, one of Britain’s top private hospitals. Several hospitals in the National Health Service have also outsourced their transcription to India, sparking concern over data safety following the latest investigation. 

In this HITECH era of increased scrutiny of protected health information security here in the U.S., this has to be a worst-case scenario for offshore outsourcing firms already concerned about the effect HITECH will have on their business.