FirstCare Health Plans

The covered entity (CE), FirstCare Health Plans, reported that an employee sent an email containing the electronic protected health information (ePHI) of 8,056 individuals to an external email account. The ePHI involved included names, health insurance information, diagnoses, clinical information, and other treatment information. In its mitigation efforts, the CE sanctioned the workforce member and implemented additional administrative and technical safeguards to better protect its ePHI. The CE also retrained its staff on the proper methods of recognizing and responding to fraudulent email communications. OCR obtained assurances that the CE implemented the corrective actions noted.