NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Patients at risk: Vendor hack leads to healthcare data breach
Hospital and healthcare data breaches are not uncommon occurrences, although this case features an attack on a third party vendor to get at the healthcare data. The Pain Treatment Centers of America (PTCOA) and International Surgery Institute (ISI) have reported a potential breach in patient health information, following a hack on third party vendor Bizmatics, putting over 19,000 patients at risk.
Bizmatics is a vendor that operates the EHR and healthcare practice management tool used by PTCOA and ISI. Said tool is used to manage patient files, which means it holds all the medical records of the companies’ patients, which accounts for approximately 19,397 individuals.
According to HealthITSecurity, Bizmatics’ data servers were accessed by an unauthorized party late in 2015, and notified PTCOA earlier this year. Bizmatics has been working with law enforcement to investigate the cause and what information was stolen, but also reports that the incident was contained and all the systems are now secure.
Among the potentially stolen information, HIPAA Journal reports, are patients medical records, health insurance information, personal information such as names, addresses, driver’s license and ID numbers, and in some cases, even Social Security numbers. All of that is information that could be used for identity theft, especially in the case of those with stolen Social Security numbers.
While Bizmatics ensures PTCOA and ISI that patient files were probably not the hacker’s targets, but there’s no guarantee that they were still not among the data stolen. As such, they’ve been notified those affected, and set up a call center for any questions regarding the breach. Affected patients will also receive a free year of credit monitoring and identity protection services.
If the patients are lucky, their information was not among that accessed. But one should never bank on being lucky, so the identity and credit protection services should be utilized to their fullest, if just to be safe.
Photo by Presidencia de la República Mexicana
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