A man in West Virginia is suing a hospital in Morgantown for negligence claiming the hospital allowed an employee to access his medical records on three occasions.
Interestingly both the victim and the hospital employee have the same last name. There have been no indications as to whether they are related.
The hospital employee passed along the information from the victim's medical records to several people who know the victim, causing him emotional distress and embarrassment, according to the suit.The victim is seeking damages, award for emotional distress and embarrassment, legal fees, and pre- and post-judgment interest. The case is case number: 11-C-774
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Sources:
(a) Morgantown man blames WVU for medical record breach - The Record - West Virginia's Legal Journal, 1/17/2012
A 2012 report released by the World Economic Forum, titled, “Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development,” outlines some of the possibilities data can bring around the globe to business and education. It also warns of its potential privacy implications.
The Patient Privacy Rights (PPR) Foundation, which positions itself as the nation’s health privacy watchdog, announced new board members from Harvard, Microsoft, and University of Texas at Austin. 
The breach involved the victims former partner, a health care assistant, who accessed his confidential medical files at the hospital. The hospital employee claimed she started improperly accessing the victim's files when he failed to come home one night and she checked the hospital system to see if he had been admitted to A&E
Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen and Consumer Protection Commissioner William Rubenstein announced an Assurance of Voluntary Compliance (“AVC”) with Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. (“MetLife”) over the disclosure of personal information
Preventing and detecting internal breaches is one the top 5 priorities for healthcare organizations in 2012, according to Healthcare Information Security Today survey conducted by HealthcareInfoSecurity.
“Unfortunately, a nurse accessed information on patients for whom she had no clinical responsibility,” explained an administrator at a hospital in Mount Pleasant, Texas.
Accretive Health is being sued by the Minnesota Attorney General, Lori Swanson, over a patient privacy breach that occured last summer.
"It's becoming increasingly clear that the age of strictly voluntary compliance with respect to HIPAA has come to an end, and the threat of expensive settlements and corrective action plans with federal and state regulators is becoming an increasing reality."
"We had a very, very lax culture around privacy, and because we happened to treat an A-list of celebrities, it got national attention. But the reality was we were sloppy not only with celebrities, but also with a nurse looking at another nurse's records to see if she was really sick yesterday. That was our culture."
A hospital employee in Liverpool England was fined for unlawfully accessing the medical records of five members of her ex-husband's family. 
According to attorney Robert Belfort, the 3 best ways to prevent healthcare information breaches are:
There is a misconception that only e-commerce and banking companies are vulnerable to attacks but that the real danger now comes from theft of internal information such as personal data, research and development or intellectual property - Shawn Henry, executive assistant director of the FBI speaking at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s International Conference on Cyber Security.
Medical and healthcare groups saw the largest incidence of insider theft, as did non-financial businesses according to a forthcoming study from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). 
Key points about Big Data from an article today in the Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital:
"Employee abuse of IT systems and information" is one the top five "high threats envisioned for information security" according to Deloitte's fifth annual Global Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Security Survey
Interesting piece on health privacy by Deven McGraw, Director of Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology
A hospital janitor has pleaded guilty to wrongfully disclosing protected patient information for personal gain.
A customer of a gaming club won a cash settlement after an employee of the club revealed details about the customer's winnings and losses to the customer's spouse while the couple were going through a divorce.
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