A recent ransomware attack at a Texas hospital that knocked out phone and email systems for weeks is now even worse following OakBend Medical Center's admission that the hackers downloaded data from the medical records of up to 500,000 individuals.
A U.S. federal district judge said users would be "shocked to realize" that Facebook collects patient data. Plaintiffs suing the social media giant asked the judge to enjoin the company from intercepting health data and communications through its Pixel web tracking tool embedded into patent portals.
A Georgia-based home health and hospice provider will pay $425,000 to Massachusetts to settle litigation stemming from a 2020 breach affecting about 166,000 individuals nationwide. The agreement comes shortly after Aveanna Healthcare settled a proposed class action lawsuit in federal district court.
Federal regulators have issued new guidance explaining how they will consider the "recognized security practices" of healthcare entities and their business associates during HIPAA enforcement activities, such as breach investigations and security audits.
A second healthcare entity is self-reporting its use of Facebook Pixel in web patient portals as a data breach to federal regulators. North Carolina-based WakeMed Health and Hospitals told federal regulators it disclosed to the social media giant patient information of half a million individuals.
Healthcare entities need to rehearse breach response playbooks to avoid paying fines to the Department of Health and Human Services for poor incident response after a severe breach. Well-tested security incident response plans ensure the security of patient data, says the HHS Office of Civil Rights.
The federal tally of health data breaches reached a new milestone this week: Since its inception in September 2009, more than 5,000 major incidents have been posted to the Department of Health and Human Services' HIPAA breach "wall of shame."
As controversy grows around the use of Facebook Pixel code and similar tracking tools that harvest sensitive health and other personal data of consumers, so does the pressure from lawmakers demanding answers from tech vendors about those data collection practices.
Health insurer EyeMed Vision Care will pay New York regulators $4.5 million to settle an investigation into its 2020 data breach incident. States are becoming more aggressive in applying enforcement actions against data breaches, say regulatory attorneys.
Advocate Aurora Health is notifying 3 million individuals of a health data breach involving the organization's "previous" use of web tracking tools from tech vendors including Google and Facebook's parent company, Meta. The entity says it has disabled or removed those tracking services.
A former doctor who practiced internal medicine in several states has pleaded guilty in a New Jersey federal court to criminal HIPAA violations in a case that also involved a pharmaceutical salesman and a larger alleged $2.5 million healthcare fraud conspiracy.
A Georgia-based cancer testing laboratory has reported to federal regulators a phishing breach affecting the sensitive information of nearly 245,000 individuals. It is the lab's second hacking breach affecting hundreds of thousands of individuals reported over the last six months.
At the onset of the novel coronavirus public health emergency, regulators said they would not enforce certain potential HIPAA violations involving telehealth. But with that 2020 policy still in play, patients need to be better informed of telehealth's privacy and security risks.
A Maryland couple faces federal indictment for an alleged conspiracy to provide the Russian government with military medical records. Anna Gabrielian and U.S. Army Maj. Jamie Lee Henry supplied an undercover FBI agent with medical records of military personnel.
Healthcare providers and their health IT vendors need more time to meet a pending federal deadline to comply with information-sharing regulations that pertain to an expanding set of electronic health information, say a slew of heavyweight lobbying groups in a letter to federal regulators.
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