HHS Office for Civil Rights Settles HIPAA Investigation with Arizona Hospital System Following Cybersecurity Hacking

Banner Health pays $1.25 million to settle cybersecurity breach that affected nearly 3 million people

OCR has announced a settlement with Banner Health Affiliated Covered Entities (“Banner Health”), a nonprofit health system headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, to resolve a data breach resulting from a hacking incident by a threat actor in 2016 which disclosed the protected health information of 2.81 million consumers. The potential violations specifically include: the lack of an analysis to determine risks and vulnerabilities to electronic protected health information across the organization, insufficient monitoring of its health information systems’ activity to protect against a cyber-attack, failure to implement an authentication process to safeguard its electronic protected health information, and failure to have security measures in place to protect electronic protected health information from unauthorized access when it was being transmitted electronically. As a result, Banner Health paid $1,250,000 to OCR and agreed to implement a corrective action plan, which identifies steps Banner Health will take to resolve these potential violations of the HIPAA Security Rule and protect the security of electronic patient health information:

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