Home Health & Hospice Week

VNA notifies patients of stolen laptop.How far do you want to go in policing your business partners' HIPAA information security practices? One Connecticut home care provider may wish it had gone further after a recent HIPAA violation.VNA HealthCare in Hartford, Conn. and its parent Hartford Hospital learned that a contractor's employee doing hospital readmission data analysis had a laptop stolen from the employee's home, the VNA and hospital say in a release. The laptop contained unencrypted data on more than 7,400 VNA patients and 2,000 hospital patients, they reveal.The data includes patients' names, addresses, dates of birth, marital status, Social Security numbers, Medicaid and Medicare numbers, medical record numbers, and certain diagnosis and treatment information. Having such unencrypted data on the employee's laptop was a violation of the contractor's policy, the VNA and hospital note in the release.The HIPAA breach isn't technically the VNA's fault. The providers "go to great [...]