The Paubox HIPAA Breach Report analyzes protected health information (PHI) breaches affecting 500 or more people as reported to the HHS. This report will cover:
HIPAA Breaches Ranked by People Affected
Top three breach types
- Email breaches ranked in first place with 267,307 people's protected health information affected.
- Other breaches ranked second with PHI of 105,495 people breached.
- Network Server breaches came in third with 54,611 people having their PHI breached.
HIPAA Breaches Ranked by Occurrence
The most common
- Other took the top spot as the most common breach type in this month's report with 19 reported breaches.
- Email came in second with 13 breaches.
- Network Server and Paper/Films came in tied for third with 4 reported breaches each.
Takeaways
For the first time since we started the Paubox HIPAA Breach Report in July 2017, the Other category took the top spot for HIPAA Breaches Ranked by Occurrence. As we dug in further to the data, 15 of the 19 reported breaches were attributed to Texas Health Resources.
According to this article, an error within its billing system caused patient information to be mixed up in mailings across North Texas.
Email breach trend in 2019
Email has ranked first in the HIPAA Breaches Ranked by Occurrence category 8 times this year, or 73% of the time.
Full data
Click here to view the raw data (Google Sheets).
About the Paubox HIPAA Breach Report
The Paubox HIPAA Breach Report analyzes breaches that affected 500 or more individuals as reported in the HHS Wall of Shame in October 2019.
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