Sutter Health is being sued for alleged negligence in the mid-October theft of a computer from Sutter Medical Foundation headquarters that held information on more than 4 million of its patients.
The class-action suit filed Monday in Sacramento Superior Court alleges that the Sacramento-based health network was negligent in safeguarding its computers and data and then in notifying the millions of its patients whose data went missing within 30 days' time.
The computer was swiped the weekend of Oct. 15. Employees discovered the theft Oct. 17. Sutter patients were being notified last week.
"Sutter should've had that under lock and key," attorney Robert Buccola of Sacramento firm Dreyer Babich Buccola Wood, LLP, which filed the suit on behalf of a patient named Karen Pardieck, said Tuesday. "If there's proprietary information in their files, they have a financial interest to make sure security is of the utmost importance."
The lost information, primarily patient names and addresses, also contained descriptions of medical diagnoses and procedures. The data was stored on a password-equipped but unencrypted desktop computer in the administrative offices of Sutter Medical Foundation in Natomas.
Sutter officials said they were in the process of encrypting patient data stored on its desktop computers, but had not yet protected the stolen computer.
On Tuesday, Sutter spokesman Bill Gleeson defended the time it took the health network to notify patients, saying a team had to first determine what was on the computer.
"It took some time. We began a detailed, complicated process of notifying that number of patients," Gleeson said.
Gleeson also said Sutter "deeply regrets the theft," but would not comment specifically on the lawsuit or on allegations that the health network had no system to back up the millions of pieces of data contained in the stolen computer.
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