The Office of Inadequate Security
The following announcement by HHS OCR stems from an accidental exposure of protected health information online that continued for several years. Inmediata’s incident resulted in a class action lawsuit that was settled for $1.1 million in 2022, and a settlement with 33 states for $1.14 million in 2023. HHS seems to be the first to…
Once again, we see a state attorney general taking data protection enforcement action against a healthcare entity when HHS hasn’t. The incident referred to below was reported to HHS’s public breach tool in December 2023, but there is no notation that any HHS investigation into it has been closed. From the NYS Attorney General’s Office,…
Watsonville Community Hospital in California is continuing to work through what they refer to as a cyberattack on November 29. The hospital’s network has been offline since then with staff reverting to “downtime” procedures using paper. The hospital has been able to continue to provide emergency, inpatient, and outpatient care but alerts patients that there…
On Christmas, December 2023, Anna Jaques Hospital (AJH) in Massachusetts was grappling with a cyberattack that knocked out their EHR system and resulted in them having to divert ambulances to other area hospitals. On January 23, they posted a preliminary website notice (archived) about the attack. That notice was posted four days after threat actors…
Here’s today’s reminder of the insider threat. It’s a shame they don’t explain how the employee was able to access the patient’s information or why it was accessed. From the U.S.A.O. of the Western District of Michigan: GRAND RAPIDS – U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Michigan Mark Totten today announced that Jessica Nicole Pitcher,…
Not all monetary penalties are for breaches affecting large numbers of patients. In this case, HHS imposed a penalty on an entity that had breaches in both 2017 and 2020. DataBreaches notes that the 2017 incident affected 3,370 patients, and the 2020 incident affected 2,553 patients — as reported to HHS at the time. Today,…