Here’s a Health Blog item that manages to combine two popular subjects in the health-care world: fraud and patient-privacy violations. A guy who used to work in the billing department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. was sentenced to prison after he pleaded guilty to stealing patient records and defrauding insurance companies of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Los Angeles Times has the story. The hospital sent letters to more than 1,000 patients in December, warning them that their records had been found in the man’s home. He was charged with using

the records of 12 patients to bill insurers for care that was never provided — a scam that netted him more than $350,000, according to prosecutors. He pleaded guilty to one count each of identity theft, insurance fraud and grand theft, along with two counts of failure to file income taxes in 2005 and 2007, the LAT says. He was ordered to pay restitution and back taxes, and sentenced to four years and eight months in prison.

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Hospital Employee Gets Jail Time for Stealing Patient Records