Stanford Hospital Says Patient Billing Records Were on Internet for Almost a Year

The names and diagnoses of about 20,000 patients in Stanford Hospital’s emergency department were publicly available on a student-help website for almost a year, according to a hospital statement released on Sept. 9.

The Palo Alto, Calif., hospital discovered the breach on Aug. 22, and quickly had the information removed from the website. But it has yet to determine how it was that billing information the hospital sent to Multi-Specialty Collection Services, of Woodland Hills, ended up getting posted as part of an exercise on making bar charts on the Web site, www.StudentofFortune.com, a website where students can pay for ...