Over the past few years, DataBreaches has reported on a breach involving Northeast Radiology and its business associate, Alliance Healthcare Services. In March 2020, Northeast Radiology revealed its patient data was involved in a breach Alliance notified them about in January, 2020. TechCrunch had contacted Northeast Radiology about its unpatched PACS servers in 2019, but had gotten no reply. In 2020, TechCrunch reported:
Northeast Radiology, a partner of Alliance Radiology, had the largest cache of exposed medical data in the U.S., according to Greenbone’s data, with more than 61 million images on about 1.2 million patients across its five offices. The server was secured only after TechCrunch followed up a month after Greenbone first warned the organization of the exposure.
Alliance spokesperson Tracy Weise declined to comment.
Now we learn that HHS OCR had opened its own investigation and has settled charges against Northeast Radiology, P.C. (NERAD):
Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced a settlement with Northeast Radiology, P.C. (NERAD), a professional corporation that provides clinical services at medical imaging centers in New York and Connecticut, concerning potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule.
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OCR initiated its investigation of NERAD after receiving a breach report from NERAD in March 2020 about a breach of unsecured ePHI. NERAD reported that between April 2019 and January 2020, unauthorized individuals had accessed radiology images stored on NERAD’s PACS server. NERAD notified the 298,532 patients whose information was potentially accessible on the PACS server of this breach. OCR’s investigation found that NERAD had failed to conduct an accurate and thorough risk analysis to determine the potential risks and vulnerabilities to the ePHI in NERAD’s information systems.
Under the terms of the resolution agreement, NERAD agreed to implement a corrective action plan that will be monitored by OCR for two years and paid $350,000 to OCR. Under the corrective action plan, NERAD will take steps to improve its compliance with the HIPAA Security Rule and protect the security of ePHI, including:
- Conducting an accurate and thorough risk analysis to determine the potential risks and vulnerabilities to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of its ePHI;
- Developing and implementing a risk management plan to address and mitigate security risks and vulnerabilities identified in its risk analysis;
- Developing and implementing a written process to regularly review records of information system activity, such as audit logs, access reports, and security incident tracking reports;
- Developing, maintaining, and revising, as necessary, its written policies and procedures to comply with the HIPAA Rules; and
- Augmenting its existing HIPAA and security training program to all of its workforce members who have access to PHI.
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The resolution agreement and corrective action plan may be found at: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/ocr-hipaa-settlement-nerad.pdf, opens in a new tab [PDF, 369 KB]