Bill Toulas reports:
Healthcare SaaS provider Welltok is warning that a data breach exposed the personal data of nearly 8.5 million patients in the U.S. after a file transfer program used by the company was hacked in a data theft attack.
Bill’s article has some good information in it, and you can read more at Bleeping Computer, but DataBreaches notes that the number reported to HHS that he cites as the total number affected may not be the total number at all.
Welltok is a business associate. Some of their covered entities/clients may have had them make the disclosure on their behalf, but some clients may choose to do their own notifications and disclosures. So, for example, Sutter Health issued their own notification and reported to HHS that 845,441 of their patients were affected. When Welltok issued its report to HHS, did their 8.5 million include Sutter, in which case the numbers are being double-counted? If Sutter’s numbers were not included in Welltok’s report (as they should not have been since Sutter filed it’s own report with HHS), what other covered entities were also not included in Welltok’s figures that we need to know about?
And did Welltok’s report to HHS include the more than 426,000 people it subsequently reported to Maine on behalf of Graphic Packaging International and Premier Health? Those weren’t listed in Toulas’s article.
The Welltok incident is certainly one of the biggest patient data breaches of 2023, if not the biggest, but 8.5 million may not be the grand total for this one.