A Georgia nursing home company has been banned from doing business in Kansas for 10 years and fined $100,000 for failing to protect patient and employee records. AltaCare Corporation, of Alpharetta, Georgia, d/b/a Pinecrest Nursing Home in Humboldt, has been enjoined from doing business in the state of Kansas for 10 years from the effective date of a consent judgment. The company was also ordered to properly destroy all Pinecrest Nursing Home records at the company’s expense by shredding, erasing, or otherwise modifying the personal information in the records to make them unreadable. The judgment resolves a lawsuit filed by Schmidt in May 2017 alleging AltaCare, as the manager of Pinecrest Nursing Home, violated Kansas data-protection laws by failing to implement and maintain reasonable procedures and practices to protect personal information and by failing to take reasonable steps to destroy or arrange for the secure destruction of records containing personal information when the records no longer are to be used. Investigators with the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division learned that Pinecrest Nursing Home was unsecured and was broken into and vandalized by unknown persons multiple times after the facility closed in 2011. Records containing personal information had been left observable and accessible in plain sight. Although Humboldt city officials notified AltaCare that the records were not secure within the Pinecrest building, the company failed to take action to protect those records and the personal information they contained.
