Here are just a few more breach reports that reveal medical or health information. The following may not be HIPAA-covered entities or may not show up on HHS’s public breach tool even if they are covered (because of the number impacted):
Lion Street Financial in Texas recently notified the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office about a hack of some employee email accounts that they first detected in January, 2021. When they investigated what was in the accounts, they found:
names and some combination of individuals’ Social Security Number, date of birth, driver’s license number, medical information, health insurance policy information, or financial account information were present in one of the accessed email accounts.
The University of Alabama also recently notified the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office that a laptop stolen from an employee in August was synced to the employee’s email account, which contained health insurance eligibility COBRA information and personal information on 185 employees and 112 of their dependents.
Premier Patient Health Care in Texas has notified the Maine Attorney General’s Office that they are notifying 37,636 patients of what appears to be an insider-wrongdoing breach. They report that in April, 2021, they discovered that a former executive had improperly accessed and acquired a file with patient data after the executive terminated with them. The file contained patients’
full name, age, sex, race, county and state of residence, and ZIP Code. The file also included Medicare beneficiary information such as your Medicare eligibility period, spend information, and hierarchical condition category risk score.
PPHC is an Accountable Care Organization and appears to be a business associate under HIPAA in this case.
Align Technology has shown up on two dark web leak sites, after they apparently refused to pay ransom demands. The entity is a manufacturer of 3D digital scanners and the Invisalign clear aligners used in orthodontics. The data dump was called to this site’s attention because it does seem to contain some patient data. DataBreaches.net has not had time to analyze the entire data dump, but this does appear to be a situation in which patient notifications will be required under HIPAA or state laws.
The preceding are just a few of the many breaches that involve health or medical data that cross my desk every day. I posted these as part of my effort to remind people to look beyond HHS’s public breach tool when trying to understand the risk to sensitive health information.