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Taking computers home at night.

Posted by: Robert Markette
May 23, 2006

I was watching the news last night and saw the story about the information about 26.5 million veterans that was stolen from a Veteran’s Administration’s employee’s home. According to the report, the employee had taken a laptop home from the office and the information was stolen when someone broke into the employee’s home. This made me think about HIPAA, because of the increasing use of lap top computers in homecare and hospice and the related potential for theft of computers which maintained protected health information (“PHI”).

In the VA’s case, the VA had a clear policy prohibiting taking computers home from the office. Nevertheless, this employee was able to leave the office with the laptop. In contrast, many home care and hospice providers allow employees to take files and/or laptop computers home with them. In most cases, the entire purpose of having a laptop is to allow the employees to take the laptops with them to patient’s homes and often home with them at night. (A similar concern would arise if you allow employees to remotely access your system, if they were to save any PHI on their home computer.)

However, this incident serves as a reminder that your protected health information may be at risk in the employee’s home. Although it is unlikely a burglar would break into an employee’s home looking for PHI, the burglar might see a laptop computer as an item of value to steal, both as a potential repository of identity information as well as an electronic item to pawn.

Although this kind of incident is a legitimate risk, in my opinion, unless your employees live in neighborhoods that have a history of burglaries, etc., the odds of such an intrusion are relatively low. Because the odds of the occurrence are relatively low, there are ways to address the security issues, without forbidding employees from taking computers at of the office.First, you should make sure that all of your computers, laptop or otherwise are password protected. This makes it more difficult for a thief to obtain information from the stolen computer. Second, if your employees are taking computers home, they should be trained to not leave them in the car or out in the open in the home. (remember, your employee’s family members can be a source of disclosures as well.) The employees should be aware of the potential risks of working on the laptop in public places as well.On the other hand, if you decide to enact a policy forbidding employees from taking files or computers home with them, you should have a way to enforce it. As the VA learned, having a policy is not enough, the employee still took the laptop home. You need to be able to prevent the employees from leaving the office with the laptop. In addition, the policy should, provide steep penalties for taking a computer home, 		        

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