Doctors Across Tennessee Keep Faxing Patient Records To A Solar Panel Company
For three years now, reports The Tennessean, the owner of a solar panel company in Indiana says "confidential medical faxes" have been sent to him by doctors throughout Tennessee. His fax number is apparently very similar to the one for the Tennessee Department of Human Services, but although he's contacted the errant doctors' offices, as well as reported it to the DHS and to the state's governor's office, they keep coming.
Keith's fax rang 167 times in a month at the peak of the problem, he said. Keith said he hasn't kept an exact count, but his office averages about five patient faxes a week and sometimes more.
[...]
E-mails between the state and Keith from April 2008 show that the Department of Human Services knew about the fax issue.
Friday, DHS said it would start asking medical staff to send a test fax to the state and to program the correct number into their fax machines.
"Doctors mistakenly fax patients' data to Indiana company" [The Tennessean] (Thanks to farfenugal!)
(Photo: mdornseif)
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Jokes about the South in 3... 2... 1...
Though I feel for the poor guy. I used to keep on getting calls for a small business because their flyer had the wrong number. I bet after a while my replies started costing them business big time. Their fault. Its not too hard to get your own number right. Especially when you print it yourself.
For a while my house was getting faxes for Chevy Chase Bank (which recently failed) with all the necessary information to withdraw those peoples money. Only after threatening to hand the faxes over to the press was the problem corrected.
Considering I deal with Tennessee doctors offices everyday, this doesn't surprise me.
Me: That person doesn't work here.
Them: I need to talk to them immediately.
Me: Well, they don't work here.
Them: You don't understand...this is important.
Me: You don't understand...I can't conjure up people that don't work here.
I imagine his calls were something like...
Solar Panel Guy: I'm getting misrouted faxes.
MD Office: No you're not.
SPG: I install solar panels.
MDO: No, you need to process this claim.
SPG: You are faxing the wrong company.
MDO: I went to Vanderbilt.
SPG: You are still faxing the wrong company.
MDO: No we are not, you are at the wrong number.
Wow...I would investigate billing the government for every fax. Or maybe the OP could write it off on his state taxes as a business expense. Ink and paper add up, especially after three years.
I think I might start calling patients instead of the doctors' offices. Once the HIPPA violations start rolling in, that might put a stop to the errant faxes.
CVS did this to me all the time! 4 separate doctors one of which my sister is a nurse practitioner. CVS said we "called" your doctor 5 times when in actuality the computer faxed to some ghost number. (the meds were delayed for 10 days or so) My sister investigated and told me no calls or faxes were ever sent. I believe it's engineered fraud as it was the same with the 3 other docs.
I now call the doctors myself.
I am forced to use CVS or Walgreens by Medicare D rules and CVS-Caremark is my insurance carrier.
Walgreens is too far.
One year in college, my dorm # was very similar to the # for Senior Citizen Health Services. For the first two weeks of the year, I got a lot of calls from elderly people wanting to talk to someone about their medical problems. I contacted the health services, and was told there was nothing I could do.
So, I started screening my calls, and changed my answering machine message to the opening skit of "Yoke the Joker" by Naughty By Nature. Within a week I stopped getting calls from confused senior citizens.
As long as it was just an inconvenience on my part, no one cared. Once it was frightening people with heart conditions, SCHS did something.
"His fax number is apparently very similar to the one for the Tennessee Department of Human Services"
SunRise Solar Inc fax 219-306-4571
Tennessee DoH fax (615)741-4165
How the hell are those two similar.
@Colonel Jack O'Neill: Large businesses and institutions often have special-use phone and fax numbers that aren't made public.
This reminds me of when I was doing my college internship. I came home from work one day and found 18 messages waiting for me, and they were all fax beeps. It continued on for a couple of weeks and then I decided to leave my computer on during the day and plug in the FAX modem and set it to receive faxes. I was hoping to find contact information to call whatever moron was sending these and tell them to stop. Sure enough, when I got home, I had 5 faxes waiting for me. The faxes had no cover sheet however, and looked to be some sort of disability and/or medical record forms. No contact info for the originating or receiving parties. What really frustrated me was that there was someone so stupid as to do this for weeks on end... maybe it was a completely automated system... but at some point you'd think that the sending party would realize that if the faxes weren't going through, they MIGHT, just MIGHT have the wrong number! I considered changing my number, but didn't want to bother calling everyone and telling them I had a new number again. So I put up with it for a couple of months.
That whole situation reminds me of the morons that try to print, and when nothing happens, they try an additional 20 times. Then when someone with a brain fixes the problem, there are 20 copies in the queue of someone else's crap. People are stupid!
@BobCoyote: A case could be made that the precedent is even more far-reaching, as the Google account in the other case had been deleted. "I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
@Colonel Jack O'Neill: It might be a case of them having the same 7-digit phone number, but with different area codes, or one being an 800/888 number. I've had a bit of experience with both of those types of errors.
He should have tried filing an FCC Form 1088, by calling the faxes junk faxes & see if the FCC would get off their fat lazy asses & actually do something!
@LMacConn: I had a similar problem in the mid-1990s. I had a second phone line in the house for FAX/computer use. Then one of the local Social Security offices moved and got a new phone number, just a digit different than my number.
After receiving a constant stream of calls at all hours, I had to get my phone number changed. Many of the seniors who called just couldn't be convinced they had either (1) dialed the wrong number or (2) that I wasn't a Social Security employee.
I used to have a telephone number that was one number away from a car dealership. My number ended it 2823, and the dealership's number ended in 2822. I would get at least one call every day except Sunday for the dealership. I finally got irritated enough to the point of putting a recording on my answering machine explaining that if they were calling for the dealership, the called the wrong number, and provided the dealer's correct number.
It helped a little but there were still tons of people calling that would leave messages on the machine asking for information on various cars.
they should bill the doctors for the faxes.
a rate of $2 per call + $1 per page after that should make this stop fast.
When I first got my current phone number I'd get fax beeps on my machine for a legal office (me: *003 their fax: *002. Luckily, the number came up on my caller ID so I could call the person back and tell them they were faxing the wrong number.
The funnest calls I got on an old number were for the local race track (me: *292 track: *252). Of course, nobody paid attention when I answered the phone "Hello" and not "race track", and they'd ask me if there was any racing that night. I'd just say "time trials at 7, racing starts at 8".
I work for a hospital, and maintain the database of doctors' contact info. This kind of screw-up is one of my nightmares.
@Smashville_makes his own comments at home: These doctor's offices are lucky. If one of the patients was litigious, the doctor might have lost his license for violating patient confidentiality.
One of the people I worked with at my last job had an office phone # of 617-xxx-yyyy, and the then BankBoston was advertising some investment fund at 800-xxx-yyyy.
Despite her voicemail greeting having nothing whatsoever to do with a bank, she still had people leaving SSNs, account numbers, all sorts of things on her voicemail. The eventual fix was to let Fleet buy BankBoston, at which point they changed their advertising and stopped promoting that number....
I got a new cell phone over the summer and for the first couple of weeks I was getting voicemails about some guys healthcare or something from Quantico.
@Ashcan: My phone number is one digit different from Child Support Enforcement. I get hangups on the answering machine all the time. I'd get a new number, but I've had it so long it would be a giant pain to change.
Once a lady left her SS# on my machine, thinking it was her caseworker, I guess. I called her back and said "DON'T DO THAT!!"
I am looking for the link. Cant find it.
But somewhere on the web is a business that actually has a comment on their contact page about making sure you send the fax to the correct number or else it will go to the IRS.
Here it is:
"
Dial the fax number very carefully.
Both the IRS and Pizza Hut have similar numbers.
A simple mistake can result in a large pizza or a field audit!
"
Somebody has a sense of humor about the problem.
Afte the first time they were unable to fix the problem I'd get the shystiest lawyer out there and have him contact the patients to sue with us splitting it 3 ways....
Solving this is very easy.
1) Fill out a complaint form
[www.hhs.gov]
2) E-mail it to OCRComplaint@hhs.gov or mail a printed copy to the address on page 2 that matches the region the claim originated from.
While this does teach the larger offices to become very careful, very quickly -- it has the unfortunate side effect of running the smaller ones out of business fairly quickly if they are found to be knowingly violating federal standards. The fines are rather prohibitive.
I have a similar problem. Some pain clinic opened up and got a phone number very similar to mine. It's amazing how many people were ignoring the message on my voicemail and leaving personal information anyway. I finally changed it to note that anyone leaving a message was giving consent to have it posted online. Apparently that was enough - nobody has left a message since, and the wrong numbers are finally starting to taper off.
@AngryK9: You SHOULD have made the recording say:
Congratulations! You are caller number TWO THOUSAND AND NINE! This is your lucky day. We have 166 vehicles on our lot to choose from for your new free car. You must visit us by 5 PM today. Be sure to bring your driver's license because you will be driving away in a free car you choose from any on our lot. Winner is responsible for tax and title costs.
I once got a refurbished computer hard drive to replace one that failed. The partition table had been zeroed out. But I looked at the other sectors of the drive to see if they zeroed the whole thing. Nope. They only zeroed out the partition table. All the rest of the data was intact, still on the hard drive. All I had to do with make a new partition table to easily access it. It was hospital billing records containing medical, identifying, and financial data. Now I can believe a hospital might fail to zero the drive themselves if it dies. But someone should as soon as the drive becomes usable, again, unless they send it back to the prior owner. Given that I worked for a large financial services company at the time, I simply zeroed it out myself and sent a note to the company auditor about it.
This happened to me with an eFax free number I used to use... every month or so I would get a fax from a network cable contractor for billable hours on specific jobs. Gee, I wonder if he ever got paid?
Another one was a free Faxdigits number (that's long gone too), got a lab report from Labcorp for some patient down south! I called LC, told them what happened and deleted the file... never happened again.
Don't people go to jail for violating HIPPA?
@gStein: Actually until the doctor's office is informed that they're sending the information to the wrong number it's not considered a violation since the office is "reasonably sure" (or whatever the wording is) that they are transmitting the information to the correct party.
Also, this headline is misleading. This has nothing at all to do with lax security.
@Real Cheese Flavor: Well, it is lax once he's informed the doctor's office and they still do it. The person getting the wrong faxes made an effort to inform the doctors, the DHS, the governor, anyone who can make the faxes stop going to the wrong number.
@joshuadavis: This also happened big time with a bank in Canada faxing info to a West Virgina junkyard (of all places).
@AngryK9: My parents had a number that was the same as a rib restaurant except a different exchange of the two typical exchanges in their town (say 556-RIBS and 555-RIBS) so people would call theirs for the "Rib House". The calls for orders got bad during the summers in the resort town but it was the worst when people would call to pick up the workers at 1-3am (pre-cell phone days).
Long story short, for a completely unrelated reason , the son of the rib house owner (who managed it) and his fiancee ended up at my parent's house on a summer Friday night during which he witnessed my father take 3 or 4 wrong number calls for rib orders. After seeing that, he comped my parents for a free eat in meal for two or a takeout bucket of chicken wings PER MONTH!
The comp worked so well that my parents changed their answering machine to say "You've reached the XXXX residence, if you want the Rib House please dial 555-1212 and also try their delicious chicken wings. If you want Mr or Mrs XXXX please leave a message." The Rib House owner's son said he actually had people add chicken wing buckets to their rib take orders due to the wrong number dialing.
They were on such good terms with him that my sister was able to easily get waitress job there for several summers.
Sadly, the Rib House later burnt down (accumulated grease per my sister) and while the wrong numbers stopped so did the comp train...
@Areyouagoodlittleconsumer: Nope, only willfully like people in California hospitals looking up celebrity health records.
This is semi-related: When you go to a doctor/practice/clinic/hospital please request that your records are not processed in India or offshore due to privacy concerns.
Alot of medical dictation transcription is going offshore to India which is basically killing that entire legitimate home based industry.
The provider- doctor/hospital will not specifically say records are going offshore but wording to the effect that "your records may be acessed by subcontractors or or other businesses providing services to the doctor/hospital" will be in what ever paperwork or contract you are asked to sign.
When I was a teen, a taxi company opened up in town. Our phone was -3086. Theirs was -3806. Got a lot of calls at 2:00 AM. Dad just answered the phone, said "Yeah, we'll be there in 10 minutes. If we're not, the ride is free."
@Smashville_makes his own comments at home:
"I went to Vanderbilt"
LOL, thanks for the laugh. My sister says that's the way it usually is.
MDO: No we are not, you are at the wrong number.
@Smashville_makes his own comments at home: What's really frightening is that this is not the first time I've read about someone being told that they are at the wrong phone/fax number.
I predict a follow-up reporting that Keith's fax machine has been confiscated, his fax number disabled and his full identity disclosed to any and all doctors that mistakenly sent him confidential records...