Michigan Medicine is notifying more than 3,600 patients of an impermissible disclosure of a limited amount of their protected health information.

In early September 2018, the Michigan Medicine Development Office launched a fundraising campaign that involved sending letters to a large number of its patients. A third-party vendor was contracted to print the letters for the mailing and while many of the letters were printed correctly, an error was made by the printing company that resulted in an impermissible disclosure of certain patients’ personal information.

According to Michigan Medicine, the error was introduced when the printing company installed new software. As a result of the error, a proportion of the letters contained information that was intended for other Michigan Medicine patients and did not match the name and address on the outside of the envelope.

Since this was a fundraising mailing, the letters did not contain any medical information, Social Security numbers, financial data, or other highly sensitive information. Patients affected by the error has their name, address, and in some cases email address and contact telephone number, disclosed to another Michigan Medicine patient.

The error was detected by Michigan Medicine on September 4, 2018 and prompt action was taken to alert the vendor to the error to prevent any further impermissible disclosures of patient information.

“Patient privacy is extremely important to us, and we take this matter very seriously,” said Jeanne Strickland, Michigan Medicine chief compliance officer. “Michigan Medicine took steps immediately to investigate this matter.”

As an additional measure to prevent similar breaches, Michigan Medicine’s Development Office will be using window envelopes for future mailings, eliminating the need to match envelopes with letters.

The Mailing error was a reportable breach under HIPAA and the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was notified well inside the 60-day reporting deadline. The breach summary on the OCR website indicates 3,624 patients were affected by the incident.

The post Michigan Medicine Notifies 3,600 Patients of PHI Disclosure Due to Mailing Error appeared first on HIPAA Journal.

Camarillo, CA-based Gold Coast Health Plan is informing approximately 37,000 plan members that some of their protected health information has potentially been obtained by hackers who succeeded in compromising the email account of one of its employees.

The employee was fooled by a phishing email and responded disclosing login credentials to the email account. The attackers gained access to the email account on June 18, 2018 and access remained possible until August 1, 2018. Gold Coast Health Plan discovered the security breach on August 8 and took steps to secure the account and prevent any further remote access.

A leading third-party cybersecurity firm was engaged to conduct an investigation into the breach and assess the scope of the incident and determine whether any patients’ health information was accessed. It was not possible to rule out PHI access and data theft with 100% certainty, although no reports have been received to date that suggest any PHI in the account has been misused.

Gold Coast Health Plan believes the attack was financially motivated and the purpose of the attackers was to gain access to banking information in order to make fraudulent transfers from Gold Coast Health Plan accounts rather than to steal plan members’ data.

The investigation confirmed that the compromised account contained claims data, health plan ID numbers, and the dates medical services had been received by plan members. Some individuals also had their name, birthdate, and/or medical procedure codes exposed. The types of information exposed varied for each patient with many patients only having one or two of the above data elements exposed.

Even though Social Security numbers and financial information was not exposed, Gold Coast Health Plan is offering breach victims a MyIDCare subscription and identity theft protection services through ID Experts without charge.

The breach has prompted Gold Coast Health Plan to implement further security controls to prevent similar breaches from occurring in the future. Those measures include enhanced end user training on security with a specific focus on phishing, increased monitoring of email accounts, and enhancements to email security controls.

The post PHI of 37,000 Gold Coast Health Plan Members Potentially Compromised appeared first on HIPAA Journal.

Paperwork containing the protected health information of approximately 1,800 patients has been discovered abandoned in a Midtown, Houston street by an employee of the CBS-affiliated television station KBOU 11.

The paperwork contained information such as patients’ names, birth dates, diagnoses, treatment information, medications, vital signs, and admission dates. KBOU launched an investigation into the breach and determined the paperwork related to patients from five Houston hospitals – MD Anderson Cancer Center, LBJ Hospital, Children’s Memorial Hermann, Memorial Hermann Hospital, and TIRR Memorial Hermann. The investigation led to UT Health.

According to the report, the records were stolen from the locked trunk of a vehicle belonging of a medical resident who, while studying at UTHealth’s McGovern Medical School, had worked at the above hospitals. The records were stolen from his vehicle in July.

Officials at UT Health confirmed to KBOU that they are aware of the breach. Reporters spoke to the medical graduate and confirmed that the incident had not been reported to the police until after he had been contacted by KBOU reporters.

A spokesperson for UTHealth issued a statement saying, “We promptly took steps to investigate the circumstances of the disclosure, which revealed that the stolen documents had been discarded on a city street and found a day later by an employee of KHOU-TV Channel 11.” The records were collected by that employee and were returned to UTHealth and have now been secured. UTHealth found no evidence to suggest that any information in the documents was viewed by unauthorized individuals.

It is unclear why the records were removed from the hospitals in the first place, why the theft was not reported to law enforcement immediately, and why the hospitals concerned had not been informed about the breach until after the records were discovered by KBOU. According to UTHealth, the affected hospitals will be issuing notifications to all affected patients in due course.

The post PHI of 1,800 Patients Found Abandoned in Houston Street appeared first on HIPAA Journal.

Aspire Health, a Nashville, TN-based provider of in-home services for patients diagnosed with serious illnesses, has experienced a phishing attack that resulted in the email account of an employee being accessed by an unauthorized individual.

Once access to the email account was gained, the attacker forwarded 124 emails to an external email account. Several of the forwarded email messages contained the protected health information of patients and “confidential and proprietary information and files”.

According to a statement issued by a spokesperson for Aspire Health, breach notification letters have already been sent to a “small handful” of its patients, although the exact number affected by the breach has not been disclosed. The data breach has yet to appear on the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights’ breach portal.

As is the case with many phishing scams, an email was sent to the employee which contained a hyperlink to a website which requested login credentials. The website, created on August 28, 2018, is hosted in the Russian Federation and was accessed by the employee on or around September 3, 2018. The employee’s email account was breached on September 3. The website has since been marked as potentially malicious by Google.

Aspire Health has launched an internal investigation into the breach, is attempting to determine whether any of the forwarded PHI has been accessed and is trying to identify the individual responsible for the attack. Part of that process has involved filing a federal court motion to get Google to reveal more information about the hacker.

The email account to which the messages were forwarded is a Gmail account and Aspire Health believes that Google could provide vital information that could allow the hacker to be identified and also help to determine whether any of the forwarded messages have been opened. According to The Tennessean, Aspire Health made informal attempts to get Google to release information about the owner of the website and the subscriber to the email account but was advised that a subpoena would be required.

Should Aspire Health’s efforts prove successful, the attacker could be identified; however, bringing that individual to justice for the attack is likely to be a much more difficult task.

The post Protected Health Information Stolen in Aspire Health Phishing Attack appeared first on HIPAA Journal.