“Human error” covers a lot of breaches. Sometimes the errors are truly accidental. Other times, they are errors in judgement. Kerry Campbell reports: P.E.I.’s privacy commissioner says an employee of a dental office on P.E.I. disclosed sensitive, personal health information belonging to more than 1,000 patients, to a member of that staff person’s family. The…
Category: Health Data
Ellwood City Medical Center Victim Of Cyber Attack, Not Sure If Patient Records Were Exposed
Lisa Washington reports: Ellwood City Medical Center officials are investigating whether any patient records were compromised Tuesday after a cyber attack. The Beaver County Times reports that on Tuesday, officials from Ellwood City Medical Center said the hospital was the victim of a cyber attack. This isn’t the first time the hospital is under scrutiny….
Aetna first notifying 238 Virginia employees of BenefitMall breach that they’ve known about since December, 2018?
In January, 2019, we learned about a breach at Centerstone Insurance and Financial Services, Inc. d/b/a BenefitMall, a business associate. The breach reportedly affected more than 111,000 insurance members/covered employees of the vendor’s clients. HIPAA Journal covered the incident. Yesterday, Aetna issued a public notice related to the incident. Surprisingly, their notice discloses that by…
Kansas hospital pays $250K to settle charges it falsified EHR security risk assessment
Nathan Eddy reports: Coffey Health System, a 25-bed critical access hospital in Kansas, has agreed to pay a $250,000 settlement for alleged False Claims Act violations related to its meaningful use attestation. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Justice charged that the hospital falsely attested that it had conducted the necessary security assessment to comply with…
Unsurprisingly, big numbers from the AMCA breach are starting to be revealed
On May 10, when DataBreaches.net first reported that the American Medical Collection Agency had been breached, we reported that information from 200,000 payment cards had been found for sale on a top-tier market by Gemini Advisory analysts, whose investigation linked those cards to AMCA. At the time, we did not know how many other payment…
Premera Reaches Proposed $74M Settlement Over 2014 Breach of 11M
Jessica Davis reports: Premera Blue Cross reached a proposed $74 million settlement with the 11 million patients impacted by its 2014 breach, caused by a sophisticated cyberattack that lasted for nearly one year before it was discovered. In January 2015, Premera officials discovered the breach that began nearly a year earlier in May 2014. Premera, Premera…