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A hospital chain with facilities in Alabama is accused of not properly protecting patient data pursuant to federal law in a new Community Health Systems data breach class action lawsuit.
There are several plaintiffs who say their rights under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act were violated because of a Chinese hacker group named “Advanced Persistent Threat” accessed CHS databases in April 2014, acquiring information protected under HIPAA that includes patient names, addresses, birth dates, telephone numbers and Social Security numbers.
The plaintiffs’ class action attorneys allege that while the company notified the Securities and Exchange Commission in August of the data breach, officials “have taken no action to promptly notify” the estimated 4.5 million people CHS says were affected by the April 2014 hack. As a result, they “were unable to take action to protect themselves from harm” and now “face a substantially increased risk of identity theft, if not actual identity theft.”
A putative Class would include all current or former customers/patients of CHS and whose Sensitive Information was wrongfully accessed, copied, and transferred in the months on or about April 2014 and June 2014.” Alternatively, the class action lawsuit seeks the certification of subclasses based on the various hospitals in the system, especially those based in Alabama.
Counts against Community Health Systems include unjust enrichment, money had and received, breach of contract, wantonness, negligence and negligence per se as well as invasion of privacy and violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act based on the ability for hackers like Advanced Persistent Threat to access sensitive information.
The class action lawsuit is just the latest in a number of cases alleging that hospital systems have failed to protect against a data breach under violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act with putative classes representing tens of millions of patients. It remains unique in that many of those other instances of theft have relied on an intruder or employee making off with a hard drive or computer, rather than remote access and especially intrusions from outside the United States.
The plaintiffs are represented by class action attorneys Donald W. Stewart, Greg W. Foster and T. Dylan Reeves of Stewart & Stewart PC.
The Community Health Systems Data Breach Class Action Lawsuit is Denise B. Alverson, et al. v. Community Health Systems Inc., et al., Case No. 14-cv-01620 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama.
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2 thoughts onHackers Spur Community Health Systems Data Breach Class Action Lawsuit
yes back in 2014 and 2015 me and my husband live in ft wayne in and we received letters telling us that our medical information had been compromised. all they offered was credit monitoring for one year. to us that is not good enough. we would like to join the class action lawsuit. I see the doj awarded $98.15 million dollars to the victums of the suit. we contacted Beasley and Allen Attorneys at law in the state of Alabama. we received a letter telling us they had not received the letter from chs about the breach. we faxed it in and then we got the letter in the mail from Andrew E Braschier telling us our case was closed. where is our share of the $98.15 million dollars that doj says they are awarding their clients. where is our justice trusting our federal government. where is the trust between people the American public and our united states government. to the little people like their is no justice. the united state of America is not the land of free or home of the free.we want our justice served. hugh and mary kilgore
My spouse and I both had our information stolen from this location, because the hospital we used in Arkansas did not inform us that they were outsourcing our information. We were told that our records were stored at this location only in Arkansas and that they were secure and encrypted, that only the local doctors we used would have access. We did not get any info about our children whose information was also stored at the Arkansas location, upon contacting the Arkansas hospital to see if our childrens records were also sent to Community Health Systems, we were told they were not answering any questions and hung up on us.