Telehealth Privacy Violations

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a piece of legislation that was introduced to simplify the administration of healthcare, prevent healthcare fraud, and ensure that employees could keep healthcare coverage if between jobs.

There have been updates to HIPAA since 1996 when it was enacted to improve privacy protections for patients to ensure healthcare data is protected.

Privacy laws are meant to protect patients’ personal health data, and when institutions fail to protect personal data they may be sued for damages. In recent years much health data has been leaked and stolen, causing significant damages to plaintiffs who have have taken legal action. 

In a recent case the American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA) settled with nearly 21 million people in 40 states and Washington D.C. concerning a data breach that may have exposed their personal information. The breach, which occurred in 2018, lasted nearly a year until official notice of the intrusion.

An unauthorized user gained access to the AMCA internal data system and collected the personal information, including Social Security numbers, financial information, and personal health information, such as medical tests and diagnostic codes.

Quest Diagnostics was alerted that the hack exposed the personal medical data of 11.9 million of its patients. LabCorp had 7.7 million patients exposed. A number of class action lawsuits were filed throughout the country, alleging negligence, breach of contract, and a variety privacy violations concerning data security.

HIPAA violations are often discovered during internal audits. Supervisors may also identify areas of non-compliance or see employees blatantly violate HIPAA Rules. The penalties for violations of HIPAA Rules can be severe, with fines of up to $25,000 per violation. Fines of up to $1.5 million may be possible for a particular company in any given calendar year.

If your personal health data has been stolen or improperly leaked, you may have a data privacy claim against those responsible. Contact The Lyon Firm for a free and confidential case review.

A Class Action is a lawsuit brought by an individual on behalf of all other similarly situated individuals. Rule 23 of the Federal and State Rules of Civil Procedure allows for Class Action lawsuits to resolve disputes in an efficient format.

Class Actions are typically filed when the amount of money in dispute for a single plaintiff would not justify litigating the case, but where the amount of damages of the entire class of Plaintiffs would justify the cost of litigation. Without class actions, large corporate defendants would be able to cause small amounts of harm over a large group of individuals without any risk of monetary penalty.

Meta’s data trackers are embedded in many of the websites we all use. The Meta Pixel tool is a piece of JavaScript code that websites can use to track the movement of users across the site. The Meta Pixel tool records information liked user IP addresses and the actions of users.

On telehealth websites, for example, Meta Pixel can record medical and personal information. The collected information and tracking data is then sent to Meta to be processed, stored, and used for targeted advertising.