HHS OCR breach portal (HIPAA breaches affecting 500 or more individuals) Primary notice
Posted on the HHS Office for Civil Rights breach portal with a submission date of Aug. 20, 2010.
- Organization as reported
- Cook County Health & Hospitals System, IL
- Entity type as reported
- Healthcare Provider
- Category as reported
Theft
- Location of information as reported
- Laptop
- Submission date
- Aug. 20, 2010
- Observed by BreachRecords
- 2026-10-18 16:15 UTC (revision 15989, row:7128)
- Archived copy
- Held in the private archive (provenance)
An employee's laptop was stolen out of a locked office; evidence shows that the laptop was password protected but not encrypted. The laptop contained the protected health information (PHI) of approximately 7,000 individuals. The PHI stored on the laptop included names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, internal encounter numbers, and other administrative codes. Following the breach, the covered entity notified those individuals reasonably believed to have been affected by the breach, placed notice on its website and with a local news center; established stringent computer security guidelines, and retrained its staff in the new requirements with the intention of preventing a similar event from occurring again. \