Providence Health Care Case Study

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On July 16, 2008 Seattle based Providence Health and Services settled with
HHS (Health and Human Services) agreeing to pay them 100,000.00 and implement a detailed Corrective Action Plan (CAP) for violations that occurred on several occasions between Sept. 2005 and March 2006 when Providence employee’s removed backup tapes, optical disks, and laptops, all containing unencrypted electronic protected health information (ePHI) from hospital premises which were later lost or stolen. However, Providence’s cooperation with OCR and CMS enabled HHS to resolve this issue, without imposing any civil monetary penalty against Providence even though ePHI for 386,000 patients was compromised. The CAP that was implemented required Providence to provide training …show more content…

CVS/Caremark agreed to pay $2.5 million and implement a detailed CAP to ensure that protected health information of its customers was disposed of properly. It was reported by a media source that CVS’s employees were throwing away old prescriptions and labels from pill bottles into unsecured dumpsters that the public had access to. CVS/Caremark is one of the largest pharmacy chains and pharmaceutical distributors in the country with over 6,300 stores. Upon completion of the investigation conducted by HHS and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) it was revealed that although CVS had provided training to its employee’s it was not sufficient to cover the disposal of non-electronic PHI consistent with the Privacy …show more content…

It is obvious in all three investigations that the patients are left to fight their court cases alone. When HHS, does these investigations they spend the tax payer’s money, and the money that they get from fining these health care facilities. Why is there no accommodations made for the patients? After all, that is the reason HHS, FTC and OCR are in business. I also feel that we should have a department that is set up to handle these cases, with lawyers to fairly prosecute these large companies for not following our laws correctly. I feel that as an individual it would seem like a very daunting task to win a judgement against a big corporation like New York Presbyterian, or CVS/Caremark even though the judgements against them will almost insure victory for the patients. I feel the government should stand behind these patients, and help them through a problem that could last for years. These days identity theft is on the rise. If we cannot expect the companies that require us to provide this information to process our claims, to handle it properly, then there should be recourse that doesn’t require long court

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