Each month, we review healthcare breaches to determine the leading cause and how the incidents could have been prevented. We do so by examining the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) online breach portal. The OCR publicly posts healthcare breaches that affected 500 or more patients to ensure that all affected patients know their information could have been potentially compromised. A shower of [...]
Adaptive Health Integrations, based in North Dakota, reported an incident of unauthorized access to protected health information. There were potentially 510,574 patients affected in the massive breach. More details regarding the Adaptive Health Integrations Breach are discussed below. How Did the Adaptive Health Integrations Breach Occur? What’s Their Response? According to a breach notice released by Adaptive Health Integrations, they had [...]
Each month, we review healthcare breaches to determine the leading cause and how the incidents could have been prevented. We do so by examining the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) online breach portal. The OCR publicly posts healthcare breaches that affected 500 or more patients to ensure that all affected patients know their information could have been potentially compromised. Cybercriminals hit a [...]
You may have been hearing a lot about HIPAA breach notification reporting lately and for a good reason. The deadline to report small-scale breaches to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is March 1st. When reporting breaches to the HHS OCR, they require you to submit a HIPAA Breach Notification Form. Before completing the form, [...]
Hopefully, you’ve been keeping a list of your minor breaches that occurred in 2021 because now is the time to report them to the Department of Health and Human Services. As the 2022 HIPAA breach notification rule deadline approaches, it is important that you know the deadline and understand what incidents need to be reported. When is the 2022 HIPAA Breach Notification [...]
In January of 2022, EyeMed Vision Care LLC, a New York vision benefits provider, settled an action brought by the New York State Attorney General against it for failing to implement adequate data security measures, including multifactor authentication, password management, and logging of email accounts. These deficiencies resulted in a 2020 email data breach during which hackers accessed an EyeCare email account [...]
With at least six weeks before final numbers are in, the Department of Health and Human Services HIPAA Breach Reporting Tool website is reporting 713 major healthcare data breaches in 2021, an increase of more than 7.5 percent. By the Numbers: Major Healthcare Data Breaches Increase in 2021 Protected health information (PHI) from more than 45.7 million patient records was affected by [...]
Electronic Health Record (EHR) services provider QRS Inc. is facing a data breach lawsuit following an August cyberattack that may have compromised the privacy of 319,778 patients. Background of QRS Data Breach Lawsuit In a statement on their website, QRS confirmed their discovery on August 26, 2021, that a threat actor had accessed a server and may have obtained electronic protected health [...]
FlexBooker is an online appointment scheduling platform that services small businesses across several industries, including the healthcare industry. On December 23, 2021, FlexBooker disclosed that it had suffered a breach that resulted in the theft of sensitive data, some of which has been posted to the dark web. According to reports from Have I Been Pwned, the FlexBooker breach has affected 3,756,794 users thus far. [...]
An October 2021 cyberattack on Broward Health resulted in the extraction of up to 1.3 million pieces of protected health information (PHI) from the system’s computer network during the hospital data breach. What Occurred in the Broward Hospital Data Breach Broward Health is a public non-profit hospital system composed of four hospitals in the greater Ft. Lauderdale, Flordia area. According to a [...]
