HIPAA

Peachtree Orthopedics announced that its systems suffered a data breach back in October, but they didn’t release the number of affected patients.  That number has been now been discovered: 543,879.  The data breach is the sixth largest in the country this year and the largest in the state of Georgia. The Dark Overlord, probably a single […]

One of the big stories of the recent presidential election was the release of documents from cyberattacks that were commonly blamed on Russia.  President Obama has ordered an investigation into the attacks. The cyberattacks targeted the Democratic Party and gained access to emails that it released to the public.  Russia has denied responsibility and president-elect Donald […]

If there was ever any doubt whether the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) was focused on the HIPAA Business Associate Agreement, three recent settlements totaling $5.8 million prove they are. Additionally, the OCR has issued its first settlement against one of these Business Associates with a $650,000 fine for […]

As part of their crackdown, federal regulators have issued their 13th major HIPAA enforcement this year. The University of Massachusetts Amherst were given a $650,000 fine and a corrective action plan to fix the issues found by the US Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights. The agency went out of their […]

The Secret Service has issued a new warning to the banking industry about a new type of skimming device that has started showing up at ATMs. Being called “periscope skimming,” it involves a connecting a probe directly into an ATM’s circuit board in order to steal bank card data. The thieves behind the technology were […]

Picture this: You want to check something from your doctor, so you log into your medical portal to see your health information; only, instead of seeing your information, you see the data from another person. Of course you are going to wonder, “Does that mean someone can see mine as well?” This exact scenario has […]

According to the Health and Human Services Office for the Inspector General (OIG), in 2014 almost 60% of hospitals had an outage in their Electronic Health Records (EHR) and 25% of those say it delayed patient care. Of those outages, 20% lasted longer than eight hours with 15% having a negative impact on patient care […]

Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) was accused of violating two HIPAA data breaches involving protected health information (PHI). The first breach revolved around a stolen laptop. The second breach occurred when OHSU contracted cloud storage usage without securing a business associate agreement. Although these violations have not yet caused harm to any OHSU patients, […]

Unfortunately for medical practices the transition and reliance on digital patient records have brought with it a new set of problems. Between hackers stealing patient data or holding it for ransom with ransomware and the increased chances of a HIPAA audit, smaller medical practices run the risk of being forced to close down. In 2011, […]

June saw the most patient data breaches for 2016 so far, with over 11 million patient accounts compromised, according to a new report.  Over ten million of them came from one single breach. Hackers are not the sole cause of all the data breaches, though they caused a significant portion at just over 40%.  The same […]

A new strain of ransomware has surfaced that is targeting hospitals. Being called “Crysis”, this new malware not only encrypts a hospital’s files, it then uploads that data to the hackers’ servers. As you can imagine, this has hospitals less concerned about if they should pay the ransom, but the HIPAA nightmare this creates. This […]

With the tragic events that unfolded in Orlando at the Pulse nightclub, a lot of questions about LGBT safety, gun control, and terrorism are being asked. And rightly so. Unfortunately, what has been lost in the tragedy is how HIPAA laws are used and how even those within the medical community often lack proper education […]