On February 16, 2017, the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) disclosed a $5.5 million settlement with Memorial Healthcare Systems (MHS) for HIPAA violations affecting the protected health information (PHI) of 115,143 individuals. The Resolution Agreement, which can be found here, also contains a detailed corrective action plan (CAP).

The Florida-based health system reported to OCR that the PHI had been impermissibly accessed by MHS employees and impermissibly disclosed to affiliated physician office staff. The PHI consisted of names, dates of birth, and social security numbers.

According to OCR, the login credentials of a former employee of an affiliated physician’s office had been used to access the ePHI maintained by MHS on a daily basis without detection from April 2011 to April 2012, affecting 80,000 individuals. Although it had workforce access policies and procedures in place, MHS failed to implement procedures with respect to reviewing, modifying and/or terminating users’ right of access, as required by HIPAA. The health system also failed to regularly review records of information system activity for its applications that maintain electronic PHI and which are accessed by workforce users and users at affiliated physician practices. To make matters worse, the health system failed to review the audit information despite having identified this risk on several risk analyses conducted by MHS from 2007 to 2012.

“Access to ePHI must be provided only to authorized users, including affiliated physician office staff” said Robinsue Frohboese, Acting Director, HHS Office for Civil Rights. “Further, organizations must implement audit controls and review audit logs regularly. As this case shows, a lack of access controls and regular review of audit logs helps hackers or malevolent insiders to cover their electronic tracks, making it difficult for covered entities and business associates to not only recover from breaches, but to prevent them before they happen.”

While hacking incidents typically garner more media coverage, this case highlights the increasing threat posed by those inside a HIPAA-regulated organization. According to a Protenus report, nearly 60% of the breaches that occurred this past January involved insiders. Organizations would be well-served by reviewing recent OCR guidance on the importance of audit controls.