The Sun and the Wall Street Journal ran stories today about patient identity theft at Johns Hopkins that prompted the hospital to issue a warning letter to patients. The letter, available from WSJ's health blog, went out to 46 victims, 526 possible victims who will receive credit monitoring at Hopkins' expense, and 10,200 patients whose information was accessed by the unnamed employee of the hospital's patient-services department.

The story sounded an awful lot like one I wrote last February, when Michelle Courtney Johnson, a patient-services employee at Hopkins, was charged with stealing patient identities. One of the victims, Deborah Wall, had undergone a kidney transplant at Hopkins and found that both she and the donor of her new kidney had been the victims of fraud.

Hopkins spokesman Gary Stephenson said the two cases, though similar, were completely unrelated. Both Johnson, and her alleged accomplice, Shanell Bowser, pleaded not guilty to charges in the earlier case, and will go to trial in September.

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