As the list of healthcare sector entities affected by the recent hacking of Accellion's File Transfer Appliance platform continues to grow, the technology vendor faces a lawsuit filed by one of its affected clients, health insurer Centene Corp.
Hacking incidents - including ransomware attacks, phishing scams and episodes involving vendors - are still the dominant culprits in major health data breaches being reported to federal regulators so far this year. Why?
A coalition of 41 state attorneys general has reached a settlement with American Medical Collection Agency in the wake of a 2018 data breach that compromised the data of 21 million individuals and pushed the company to file for bankruptcy.
Many of the major health data breaches added to the federal tally so far this year involve business associates, continuing a trend in recent years. The largest of those is an incident reported by a children's health and dental insurance plan provider involving a website hosting vendor.
Nebraska Medicine/UNMC has just begun notifying 219,000 individuals of a hacking incident that was discovered last September. The lag between breach discovery and notification illustrates the difficulties organizations often face in incident response, some security experts say.
From both a regulatory and a security perspective, it’s not enough to simply perform a risk analysis. The HIPAA Security Rule requires and today’s rapidly evolving threat landscape demands that healthcare organizations respond to the risks identified appropriately and effectively.
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The prospects for passing a U.S. privacy law will improve under the Biden administration, predicts attorney Kirk Nahra, who offers a legislative outlook.
In a ruling that could have a profound impact on HIPAA enforcement, a U.S. Court of Appeals has vacated a $4.3 million HIPAA civil monetary penalty levied by federal regulators against the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in the wake of three breaches involving unencrypted mobile devices.
The Department of Health and Human Services has slapped Excellus Health Plan with a $5.1 million settlement in the wake of a 2015 data breach that affected more than 9.3 million individuals.
Hacking incidents, including ransomware and phishing attacks, as well as security incidents involving vendors dominated the federal tally of major health data breaches in 2020.
As federal regulators intensify their focus on compliance with requirements to provide patients with access to their health information, healthcare organizations need to sort through a variety of emerging challenges, says health information management and privacy expert Rita Bowen.
The growth in the use of telehealth during the COVID-19 crisis means that healthcare providers must carefully reassess and bolster the security of the connected devices, applications and systems used, says Kelly Rozumalski of the consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton.
In the year ahead, healthcare organizations must be prepared to face an assortment of advancing security threats, including those that damage the integrity of critical patient data, says Rod Piechowski of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.
The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted an array of evolving patient privacy issues that legislators and regulators will need to address in the year ahead, say government policy experts Mari Savickis and Cassie Leonard of the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives.
Under legislation passed by Congress this weekend that awaits President Trump's signature, HIPAA enforcers, when considering financial penalties for compliance violations, would need to determine whether an organization had implemented "recognized security practices," such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
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