Conifer Revenue Cycle Solutions provided notice on Friday concerning a breach on January 20, 2022, when an unauthorized individual accessed a Microsoft Office 365-hosted business email account.
Conifer discovered the breach on April 14, 2022.
The email account is separate from Conifer’s internal network and systems, which were not impacted. But the compromise enabled the attacker to access some patient information in that email account. The types of information from the various covered entities’ patients that may have been involved may have included one or more of the following elements: (1) information to identify the individual (such as full name, date of birth, and address); (2) Social Security number, driver’s license/state ID number, and/or financial account information; (3) medical and/or treatment information (such as medical record number, dates of service, provider and facility, diagnosis or symptom information, and prescription/medication); (4) health insurance information (such as payor name and subscriber/Medicare/Medicaid number); and (5) billing and claims information.
Conifer’s full notice is available on the website IDX created to respond to the incident. That notice indicates that Conifer is providing notice on behalf of the following healthcare providers:
- Baptist Health System
- Resolute Health Hospital
- The Hospitals of Providence Memorial Campus
- Valley Baptist Medical Center – Brownsville
- Valley Baptist Medical Center – Harlingen
All of the above are Texas entities. Conifer also provided notice on behalf of Brookwood Baptist Medical Center in Alabama. DataBreaches does not yet know if there may be other “on behalf of” notification sites for covered entities in other states.
Because Resolute Hospital and Baptist Health reported incidents in June that had been discovered in April, DataBreaches contacted Resolute to confirm whether this Conifer report was a new/unrelated breach or if it was the same incident Resolute and Baptist had reported in June. Their spokesperson confirmed that the Conifer incident is a second, unrelated incident.
The Conifer incident has not appeared on HHS’s public breach tool as of this publication, so we do not yet have any total numbers for it.