The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Office of Civil Rights (OCR) entered into a settlement with Presence Health Network relating to its failure to provide timely notification of a breach of unsecured protected health information under the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA). OCR data breach settlements typically concern a covered entity’s failure to properly secure protected health information; this marks the first settlement involving a provider’s failure to report a data breach in a timely manner.

Under the HIPAA Breach Notification Rules, covered entities must provide notification of a breach without unreasonable delay and in no case later than 60 days following the discovery of a breach to affected individuals, and, in breaches affecting more than 500 individuals, to OCR and the media.

Presence Health is a not-for-profit health system serving 150 locations in Illinois. Presence Health first discovered that some paper copies of its surgery schedules at one location were missing on October 22, 2013, and these documents contained the protected health information of 836 individuals. The information consisted of the Continue reading →