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In 2015, Hillsides issued a press release alerting the public it became aware of a HIPAA violation caused by one of its employees. The employee in question had been using their work email to send protected health information to their personal email address. On at least five occasions between October 2014 and October 2015, the employee sent unencrypted email attachments to their personal email account containing:
- Employee Names
- Social Security Numbers
- Home addresses
- Phone numbers
- Birthdates
- Genders
- Medical identification numbers
- Therapists' names
- Patient names
This included 468 staff and 502 clients of Hillsides. To make matters worse, Hillsides was unable to recover the data from the employee's personal email account. They were also unable to verify if the files were deleted in the first place. As you can imagine, the employee was terminated for violation of company policy.
Why Would an Employee Email PHI to Their Personal Account?
When healthcare data is emailed in such volume to a personal email account, the negligent employee usually does so with nefarious motives. These include:- Using the information for personal gain when they change employer.
- Selling the data to identity thieves.
- Committing fraud or identity theft.
Due to the vast amount of personally identifiable information that was stolen in this case, committing fraud or identity theft would unfortunately be fairly straight-forward.
How Can Paubox Email Suite Premium Help?
Paubox Email Suite Premium includes email data loss prevention (DLP), which scans outbound email against rules your administrators set. A rule can look for a specific word, phrase, or number anywhere in a message, including inside attachments, or target one part of the email, such as the recipient. When an outbound email matches a rule, Paubox Email Suite Premium will:
- Quarantine the outbound email.
- Alert the people your organization has designated to receive DLP notifications.
- Notify the sender that their email was quarantined. This is on by default, and administrators can turn it off.
About Hillsides
Hillsides is a child welfare agency based in Pasadena, CA. They are dedicated to improving the overall well-being and functioning of vulnerable children, youth, and their families.
