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HIPAA Breach Report for August 2019

Picture of Hoala Greevy Hoala Greevy August 12, 2019

HIPAA Breach Reports

The Paubox HIPAA Breach Report analyzes protected health information (PHI) breaches affecting 500 or more people as reported to the HHS in July 2019.

This report will cover:

HIPAA Breaches Ranked by People Affected
HIPAA Breaches Ranked by Occurrence
Takeaways
Full Data

HIPAA Breaches Ranked by People Affected

Top Three Breach Types

Network Server breaches ranked in first place with a staggering 22,291,378 people's PHI affected. This is the highest amount of affected individuals in any given month so far this year. It's also the third consecutive month Network Server has taken the top spot in this category.
Email breaches ranked second with PHI of 127,110 people breached.
Desktop Computer breaches came in third with 116,262 people having their PHI breached.

Bottom Three Breach Types

Laptop ranked as the lowest number of people's PHI being breached with 2,201 breaches.
Paper/Films was the second lowest type of breach as ranked by people affected with 9,803.
Other was the third lowest type of breach as ranked by people affected with 18,490.

HIPAA Breaches Ranked by Occurrence

View full HIPAA Breach Report for August 2019

The Most Common

Email retook the top spot as the most common breach type in this month's report with an astounding 20 reported breaches.
Network Server came in second with 11 breaches.
Paper/Films came in third with 5 reported breaches.

Takeaways

There were two Network Server HIPAA breaches that heavily skewed this month's report. They were:

LabCorp (10M individuals affected)
Optum360, LLC (11.5M individuals breached)

In a nutshell, both LabCorp and Optum360 were negatively impacted when a vendor they both have in common, American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA), was breached. In an embarrassing admission, it took AMCA eight months to discover its systems had been compromised. In other words, AMCA served as a Business Associate to both LabCorp and Optum360. Lastly, Email regained the top spot as the most frequent breach vector in the August HIPAA breach report. In fact, Email has ranked first in the HIPAA Breaches Ranked by Occurrence category for 13 of the past 16 months.