In the case of American Medical Collection Agency’s (AMCA) highly publicized data breach, the cost proved unrecoverable as the 42-year-old parent company Retrieval-Masters Credit Bureau filed for bankruptcy just weeks after disclosing the breach.
Organizations should calculate the risk of a data breach, not only for covered entities but also for their business associates. A breach of your patient data will affect your organization, even if it’s by a business associate.

Many Chief Information Security Officers and Chief Compliance Officers often express concern to us about the potential disruption and cost that can come from an Office for Civil Rights (OCR) investigation, not to mention the reputational damage that will result from a settlement or monetary penalty. An appearance on the wall of shame is a mere blemish compared to the negative publicity of an OCR fine or settlement. However, the possibility of a State Attorney General (AG) action is often underestimated and overlooked. If a State AG enforcement is not top of mind for you and your board, it should be.

Clearwater’s recent Breakfast & Breaches event in Washington, DC brought together an outstanding group of leaders with unique insight on the growing problem of how to keep protected health information secure. Drawing on their combined decades of experience working across the compliance spectrum, our panelists and moderator challenged the audience’s thinking with regard to how their organizations analyze and manage risks.

More than half (54%)* of all individuals affected by a healthcare information breach in the past twelve months were impacted by a breach that touched the affected organization’s server, according to data provided on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights Breach Portal: Notice to the Secretary of HHS Breach of Unsecured Protected Health Information. According to the data, ninety (90) healthcare breaches — affecting more than nine million individuals—were related to servers in some way.

Clinical laboratory provider Quest Diagnostics recently acknowledged that a billings collections vendor it works with suffered a data breach on its web payment system that may have exposed information of nearly 12 million of Quest’s patients. The third-party company, Elmsford, N.Y.-based American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA), is contracted with Optum360 LLC, which in turn provides payment services to Quest.

We are living in an exhilarating time in the world of healthcare. A common theme among many healthcare related stories and articles we come across today is that things which were once thought to be a matter of science fiction are now moving closer to becoming a reality. A Feb 27, 2019, article from Forbes Magazine, entitled, “Telemedicine: The Latest Futuristic Tech Prediction from The Jetsons To Come True,” brought up a cartoon show from 1962, “The Jetsons,” in which depicted patients video conferencing physicians for diagnosis and treatment as being something commonplace.

Clearwater and Lockton Companies, the world’s largest privately owned, independent insurance brokerage firm, are hosting a series of panel discussions with security experts and officials from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The series offers attendees up-to-date information about cyber risk management strategies, HIPAA compliance and OCR enforcement. Attendees can participate in person or via live webcast.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) gave notice in the Federal Register that it is lowering the maximum annual caps for all HIPAA culpability tiers, except for the willful neglect without timely correction tier. There has been uncertainty for some time as to whether OCR’s interpretation of the statute was appropriate with regard to the $1.5M annual limit for all culpability levels.