Illinois-headquartered Flexible Benefit Service Corporation (“Flex”) is a general agency and benefit administrator serving insurance brokers, employers and insurance carriers. As such, they are a Business Associate to HIPAA-covered entities. The follow is from their notification of a security incident that was reported to HHS on February 16, as impacting 5,123 people. Flex does not indicate…
Category: Health Data
Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services Notifies 11,000 Consumers About Breach of Protected Health Information
March 1, 2018 TOPEKA, Kan. – The Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services (KDADS) has begun to notify individual consumers about a recent incident in which personal or protected health information was disseminated to a specific group of KDADS business associates. On February 23, 2018, KDADS became aware of a potential breach of personal…
Resource: 5 steps to get a handle on your practice’s cyber vulnerability
This free webinar, recorded in September, 2017, might be very helpful to small practices or solo practitioners who are feeling overwhelmed about how to start hardening their security to comply with HIPAA and to prevent attacks or breaches. From the AMA: A staggering 83 percent of physicians recently told AMA researchers that their practices have…
Verizon 2018 Protected Health Information Data Breach Report
From Verizon: We’ve re-examined the data within our Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) series (2016 and 2017) to focus in on the healthcare sector’s unique profile and security challenges, and particularly the use/abuse of protected health information (PHI). Our 2018 Protected Health Information Data Breach Report (PHIDBR) is underpinned by 1,368 incidents from this caseload…
St. Peter’s Surgery & Endoscopy Center notifying 135,000 patients of cyber attack in January
Well, I knew about the incident, but didn’t know until today that the ransomware incident involving St. Peter’s Surgery & Endoscopy Center in Albany, New York affected 135,000 patients.. Now we know.
Survey: 18% of Health Employees Would Sell Confidential Data
Those who said they were willing to sell the data would do so for as little as between $500 and $1,000. Alexandra Wilson Pecci reports: Patients trust their healthcare providers to keep their data safe, but according to a new survey, that trust might sometimes be misplaced. The Accenture survey found that nearly one in…