Healthcare Data Breaches
- The Fee Is Free Unless You Win®.
- America's Largest Injury Law Firm™
- Protecting Families Since 1988
- 20 Billion+ Won
- 1,000+ Lawyers Nationwide
Free Case Evaluation
The attorneys featured above are licensed in Florida. For a full list of attorneys in your state please visit our attorney page.
Healthcare Data Breaches
Did you know that you could be owed compensation if your personal information or privacy was compromised by healthcare data breaches? By hiring knowledgeable class-action lawyers, like those working at Morgan & Morgan, you can fight for justice, help to protect yourself, and send a message to healthcare companies everywhere about the importance of data security and patient safety.
Unfortunately, healthcare data breaches have increased in recent years due to the vast volume of information that is collected by healthcare companies and stored on their systems. Hospitals and other healthcare organizations are especially susceptible to data breaches and other malware or ransomware attacks.
Recognizing your rights and knowing what to do after a healthcare data breach is extremely important because you may be eligible to recover compensation with the help of a data breach lawyer. A knowledgeable data breach lawyer, like those working at Morgan & Morgan, may also combine your case with others who have suffered similar losses.
For example, if your information was leaked in a healthcare data breach, it could be used by others to exploit or blackmail you. You may also experience lost trust in the breached company because of their poor data protection practices, but even if you move on to a more trusted company, the damage has already been done.
If a healthcare data breach has happened to you, contact Morgan & Morgan today for a free, no-obligation case evaluation to learn more about your legal options.
Scope of Recent Healthcare Data Breaches
Between 2009 and 2021, over 4,400 healthcare data breaches involved 500 or more records, and those are just the ones reported to the United States government HHS Office for Civil Rights. Cybersecurity breaches, overall, hit an all-time high in 2021, exposing many different types of personal patient data to criminals and other hackers.
Overall, when it comes to healthcare data breaches, more than 45 million individuals were affected by healthcare attacks in 2021. That is an increase from 34 million in 2020. The number has also tripled since 2018, and more records are exposed per breach every single year.
Whether it is stealing devices, credential harvesting, or ransomware, the healthcare industry is one of the biggest targets for attackers to monetize personal health information. It can be used to hold a company like a healthcare organization ransom or unable to deliver patient care, or this data can also be sold on the dark web. It is crucial for healthcare organizations to do everything possible to proactively protect private healthcare and personal health information. Security teams should act diligently to minimize the possibility of data breaches and cyber-attacks. However, hacking and IT incidents continue to be the most common cause of data breaches for healthcare organizations.
As someone who has been subjected to a data breach, you may not even realize its initial impact or consequences for you until much later. This is why the knowledgeable class-action healthcare data breach lawyers at Morgan & Morgan evaluate each case individually and determine whether or not you have legal grounds to pursue compensation with the help of an attorney. Knowing that you're not alone and that you have a dedicated lawyer to assist you with this lawsuit may be essential. You and many other people may be able to combine your claims in a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company failed to take appropriate precautions.
Working with knowledgeable class-action lawyers like those at Morgan & Morgan may be the only way for protecting you from negative consequences. You may not even know until it is too late that your information has been leaked to someone else. Although organizations are responsible for informing the government about data breaches of personal health information, this may not always be done or even discovered promptly. This puts you and any other patient who is involved with this healthcare system at risk of having your private details leaked on the web or in other locations.
Our class-action lawyers will investigate your claim and help you to understand the legal consequences associated with these problems. The support of an experienced and qualified lawyer may be essential for helping you to craft a compelling claim against data breach issues.
If you have recently been contacted by a cybercriminal who got access to your personal medical information or if you were recently informed that your information was included in a data breach, start by conducting your own research to understand the scope of the breach and to determine whether or not you have grounds for a legal claim. You may also meet with a healthcare data breach lawyer to discuss the specifics of your case and decide whether or not you intend to move forward with the lawsuit.
You are likely not the only person who was involved in this healthcare data breach, as many reported incidents have involved cases of 500 or more consumers. In these situations, it is very common to include all of these claims together in a class action lawsuit brought by many individuals who were harmed by a company in an attempt to hold that company responsible. A knowledgeable class action lawyer can be an essential component of success in these cases.
How it works
It's easy to get started.
The Fee Is Freeâ„¢. Only pay if we win.
Results may vary depending on your particular facts and legal circumstances.
-
Step 1
Submit
your claimWith a free case evaluation, submitting your case is easy with Morgan & Morgan.
-
Step 2
We take
actionOur dedicated team gets to work investigating your claim.
-
Step 3
We fight
for youIf we take on the case, our team fights to get you the results you deserve.
FAQ
Get answers to commonly asked questions about our legal services and learn how we may assist you with your case.
-
What Are the Causes of Healthcare Sector Breaches?
Breaches are commonly observed and reported in the healthcare sector and can be caused by numerous different types of incidents, such as an insider who accidentally or purposefully disclosed patient data, lost devices, such as laptops, or malware that is used to steal credentials and login information. On the black market, personal health information is more valuable than regular personally identifiable information or even credit card credentials. This means that cybercriminals have an outstanding motivation to target databases full of medical information. In total, more than 15 million health records have been compromised by data breaches.
In most cases, healthcare organizations are targeted simply because even with advanced security systems, they have access to many different types of personal data. Getting access to even a few dozen medical records and the personal information inside could give plenty of opportunities for a cybercriminal to make money or to carry out other crimes. It could be as involved as selling all of this information to other criminals on the dark web, or it could be used to contact you personally to blackmail you to get your records back or to prevent the sharing of personal medical condition details with others in your life. This is a very difficult situation for anyone going through it, and you may feel trapped. But you don’t have to go through it alone. Reach out to Morgan & Morgan today.
-
What Makes Personal Health Information So Valuable?
For each non-healthcare-related organization, the average cost of a data breach for each stolen record is $158. For healthcare agencies, however, that cost is an average of $355. While personally identifying information, such as someone's credit card details, may sell for $2 on the black market, personal health information can sell for as much as $363.
Typically, PHI is so valuable because criminals can easily target the victims of the stolen details with scams and frauds that take advantage of the victim's medical conditions or settlements they may have received as a victim. It can also be used to open fake insurance claims to allow for the purchase and then later resale of medical equipment. Furthermore, PHI may also be used by criminals to gain access to prescriptions, either for their own personal use or for resale.
-
Does Anything Protect My Data Breach Rights in a Healthcare Situation?
The federal HIPAA security rule requires that healthcare providers do everything possible to protect electronic health records, including electronic and physical safeguards that protect health information. If a breach of more than 500 records for any reason occurs, these must be reported, and this also includes ransomware infections.
HIPAA can be very helpful when a company understands it and uses it in full scope to protect the personal data of its patients. Failing to keep appropriate security measures in mind or updating security protocols on a regular basis, however, can expose significant amounts of personal health information to criminals.
-
Do I Have Legal Rights?
You and other individuals whose information may have been stolen in a healthcare data attack may have grounds to pursue compensation with the help of an experienced lawyer. At Morgan & Morgan, we are familiar with what it takes to open a lawsuit for healthcare data breaches. As the number of these cases has been increasing in recent years, we work as hard as possible with victims of healthcare data breaches to understand the full scope of their rights and to gather the information needed to open a successful lawsuit.
Anyone who has information that has been released in a healthcare data breach may not realize the full scope of the dangers they may face. Your information can be floating out there for months or even years, exposing you to many different kinds of risks. Far too many people realize the consequences of these healthcare data breaches too late, and it is far better to consult with a class action lawyer sooner rather than later about all of your legal options.
Contact Morgan & Morgan today for a free, no-obligation case evaluation to get started.