Email DLP can monitor PHI being sent to personal accounts

In January of 2016, officials at Village of Oak Park discovered an employee had emailed spreadsheets containing the protected health information (PHI) of 688 individuals to a personal email account. The HIPAA violation was uncovered during an internal search for email correspondence between its staff and insurance carriers.

The emailed spreadsheets contained:

• Names
• Dates of birth
• Details of healthcare benefits
• Social Security Numbers

• Village of Oak Park
• Oak Park Library
• Oak Park Township
• The Park District of Oak Park
• The West Suburban Consolidated Dispatch Center

SEE ALSO: Paubox Suite Premium can Curb Automatic Email Forwarding Rules

Why Would an Employee Forward PHI to Their Personal Account?

Village of Oak Park could not determine why the employee sent the email attachments to their personal email. Although both internal and criminal investigations concluded that the data had not be abused or sold to third parties, it still represented a HIPAA violation. Since there was no legitimate reason for the PHI to be emailed to a personal email account, the employee was terminated.

How Can Paubox Suite Premium Help?

Paubox Suite Premium offers Email DLP features, which can prevent HIPAA violations by scanning outbound email to detect the presence of protected health information and other indicators. In the case of Village of Oak Park, a good email DLP solution would have detected when that employee included things like Social Security Numbers and dates of birth to a personal account.

Paubox Suite Premium provides the following benefits:

• Quarantines the outbound email.
• Sends an email alert to the DLP administrator.
• Optionally sends an email alert to the sender notifying them their email got quarantined.

SEE ALSO: Lack of Email DLP causes HIPAA Violation in California