HeartCare Consultants

On March 30, 2016, Heartcare Consultants, LLC, the covered entity (CE), discovered that its business associate (BA), Bizmatics, had experienced a cyber-attack potentially exposing the social security numbers, demographic, clinical, and health insurance information of 16,143 individuals. The CE provided breach notification to HHS, affected individuals and the media and provided credit monitoring and identity theft protection to the affected individuals. At the time of the breach, the CE failed to have in place a BA agreement with the BA. Following the breach, the CE entered into a BA agreement, revised its HIPAA policies and procedures, and retrained its entire workforce. OCR obtained assurances that the CE implemented the corrective actions listed above.