Month: October 2017

One of the major threats in keeping the confidentiality of healthcare data is phishing. If you have noticed, a number of news updates in the past weeks involved healthcare organizations announcing cases of unauthorized access […]

FirstHealth of the Carolinas is a not for profit health network based in Pinehurst, SC that a new Wannacry ransomware variant attacked on October 17, 2017. In May this year, over 230,000 computers around the […]

RiverMend Health is a specialty behavioral health services provider that helps people who have problems with alcohol and drug addiction. The RiverMend Health branch located in Augusta, GA discovered unauthorized access to the email account […]

Phishing is probably the biggest data security threat that healthcare organizations have to face today. In the past few weeks, several phishing attacks on healthcare organizations had been reported. One of which was really serious […]

According to the Breach Barometer report issued by Protenus, healthcare data breaches significantly increased in September 2017. Included in the report were cases of healthcare data breaches received by the Department of Health and Human […]

Last July 31, 2017, Advanced Spine & Pain Center (ASPC) became aware of a potential breach and unauthorized use of patients’ protected health information. About 8,362 patients who might be affected by what happened got […]

There are certain times when the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services exercises his authority to issue a limited waiver of HIPAA sanctions and penalties. In most cases, the announcement is […]

Health organizations, covered entities and their business associates need to be familiar with the HIPAA Breach Notification Rule and must strictly comply. This rule covers the issuance of notifications to patients, plan members and the […]

A tenant named Barbara Jarvis-Neavins filed a report against Illinois-based psychiatrist Dr. Riaz Baber for mishandling the medical records of more than 10,000 patients.  Apparently, the psychiatrist rented out his property to Jarvis-Neavins who eventually […]

Recently, there was an incident that a HIPAA-covered entity used an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket to store patients’ medical data. It was the researchers from Kromtech Security who discovered the cloud storage security problem. There were […]

Network Health, a health insurance provider based in Wisconsin, recently informed its 51, 232 plan holders about the unauthorized access of their protected health information (PHI). According to the report, the security breach began in August […]

The HHS wanted to simplify the administrative process for getting certification of compliance for all controlling health plans (CHPs) and promote consistent testing processes for CHPs. However, their proposal for a new rule has been […]