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More than 1.6 million patients may have had data compromised in a hack at NEC Networks, a company that provides services to hospitals, pharmacies and other healthcare providers under the name CaptureRx.
The data breach may have exposed data on an estimated 1,656,569 patients of CaptureRx s provider customers, according to a report that the company submitted to HHS Office for Civil Rights on May 5. The HHS agency publicly posted the report to its online database of healthcare data breaches in an update this week.
CaptureRx in February discovered files containing patient names, dates of birth and prescription data had been accessed and acquired by an unauthorized user earlier in the month.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Friday released a final rule requiring the agency to review its regulations once every ten years.
If a regulation is not reviewed, it may expire, said HHS.
The Securing Updated and Necessary Statutory Evaluations Timely, or SUNSET, rule, means that rules that are issued by an HHS component that are more than ten years old will need to be reviewed within five years. By terminating burdensome regulations unless their necessity is publicly demonstrated to the American people, our SUNSET rule will prove the boldest and most significant regulatory reform effort ever undertaken by the federal government,” said HHS Chief of Staff Brian Harrison.
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A Tennessee federal judge has taken the highly unusual step of denying the government s request to intervene in a qui tam suit in which it had previously declined intervention.
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On the surface, medical litigation funding and lien-based medical treatment provide a necessary service to individuals injured in an accident who would not otherwise be able to afford medical.
Foley & Lardner
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, federal agencies have sought to allow health care companies more flexibility to use popular technology and applications to better engage with their patients.
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The HHS Office for Civil Rights on Tuesday announced the most recent in a spate of monetary settlements in its HIPAA right of access enforcement.
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OCR has made enforcement of patient access a major priority in recent months. In the most recent case, Dr. Peter Wrobel and his Georgia-based practice Elite Primary Care agreed to take corrective actions and pay $36,000 to settle a potential violation of the HIPAA Privacy Rule.
In April 2019, OCR received an allegation that Elite had not responded to a patient s request for access to his medical records. A month later, the agency offered the practice technical assistance on right of access requirements and closed the complaint.
EyeMed email hack exposes 484K Aetna members data
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An Aetna affiliate on Thursday alerted the federal government that a data breach compromised hundreds of thousands of members health data.
The data breach stemmed from a hacking incident at EyeMed, a company that Aetna contracts with to provide services for members of in its vision benefit plans, a spokesperson from CVS Health, which owns Aetna, said in an emailed statement.
In July, a hacker accessed an EyeMed email account and sent phishing emails to contacts in the account s address book, according to a notice EyeMed posted on its website.
It s unclear whether the hacker viewed or exfiltrated members health data. The email account contained names, dates of birth, vision insurance identification numbers, health insurance identification numbers, and some Social Security numbers, birth certificates, medical diagnoses, and financial information of current and former members who receive vision benefits through EyeMed, incl