Large-Scale Disclosure Event Can Happen to Healthcare Organizations of Any Size

​A large-scale disclosure event involving notification of multiple patients can happen in any size organization, says David M. Sine, DrBE, ARM, CSP, CPHRM, chief risk officer for the Veterans Health Administration's Office of Quality, Safety, and Value. Speaking on October 28, 2014, at the annual conference of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, Sine said, "You don't have to be a large organization to have a large-scale disclosure." In fact, the largest disclosure event to date involved a small endoscopy clinic in Las Vegas that had to notify 40,000 patients that they could have been exposed to a bloodborne infection such as hepatitis C after the clinic's unsafe injection practices were uncovered.