A former employee of CoPilot Provider Support Services, a business associate (BA), impermissibly accessed the BA's website containing the electronic protected health information (ePHI) of 1,287 patients of the covered entity (CE). The ePHI affected by this incident included patients’ names, dates of birth, addresses, and other identifiers. The CE provided breach notification to HHS, and the BA provided breach notification to the affected individuals and the media. Following the breach, the CE stopped using the BA's website to verify patients’ insurance benefits, provided HIPAA training to all of its staff members, and documented the impermissible disclosure in the affected patients’ records for accounting of disclosure purposes. In addition, the CE executed BA agreements with all of its vendors and conducted a new annual risk analysis of its ePHI. OCR obtained assurance that the CE implemented the corrective actions listed.
