In three separate incidents, medical clinics have informed patients that their data was either accessed by unauthorized individuals or inappropriately discarded. In a letter, the Cook County Health and Hospitals System notified affected patients that an unencrypted and non-password-protected hard drive containing names, encounter numbers and administrative information was stolen. The NYU Langone Medical Center recently informed approximately 2,600 patients that records containing "limited personal information" was "mistakenly discarded, compacted and buried in a landfill." The documents contained names, dates of birth, gender and other clinical information. The Yanez Dental Corporation in California notified more than 10,000 patients that three password-protected computers containing sensitive data were stolen. 
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