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Mental Health Provider Data Breach Class Action Lawsuit Overview:
- Who: The former employee of Philadelphia mental health provider Horizon House Inc is suing the organization.
- Why: The employee says Horizon House did not protect patient and employee data, allowing cybercriminals to steal their personal information.
- Where: The class action Pennsylvania federal court
A Philadelphia mental health and treatment provider’s lax data security allowed tens of thousands of patients’ and employees’ data to be stolen by cybercriminals, a new class action lawsuit alleges.
Plaintiff Joseph Jones filed the class action complaint against his former employer Horizon House Inc—a provider of mental health, homeless and disability services—on Oct. 22 in a Pennsylvania county court.
In it, he says Horizon House failed to protect its patients and staff from a June cyberattack and data breach on its network that saw highly sensitive and personal patient and employee data stolen by cybercriminals.
The healthcare data breach affected more than 27,000 people, who will now be seeking damages due to being made vulnerable to identity theft and having to spend their time and money to remedy the potential “criminal misuse of their sensitive and highly personal information,” Jones says.
Mental Health Patient Info Exposed in Data Breach, Says Class Action Lawsuit
According to the lawsuit, hackers accessed the Horizon House system on March 5, 2021, however the health center did not inform anyone of the breach until September: six months later.
Once investigated, the health center realized information accessed by the hackers included full name, address, Social Security number, driver’s license numbers, state identification number, employment passport number, and medical information, the lawsuit says.
“Plaintiff further believes his PII, and that of Class Members, was subsequently sold on the dark web following the Data Breach, as that is the typical modus operandi of cybercriminals that commit phishing attacks of this type,” Jones says.
His complaint adds that Horizon House should have known the data it holds was at risk. The combination of the information is highly valuable to hackers, and hospitals have widely been the repeat target of cybercriminals in recent years.
Significantly, there were more than 600 health care related data breaches in 2020, affecting nearly 29 million medical records.
“Hospitals have emerged as a primary target because they sit on a gold mine of sensitive personally identifiable information for thousands of patients at any given time,” Jones says.
“From Social Security and insurance policies, to next of kin and credit cards, no other organization, including credit bureaus, have so much monetizable information stored in their data centers.”
Jones said the company had violated its common-law duty to protect private information, the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
Although federal HIPAA regulations and state laws are in place to protect your medical records from wrongful disclosure, unfortunately they don’t always prevent cybercriminals from accessing medical records that are stored electronically.
To see if you qualify to join a healthcare data breach class action lawsuit investigation click here (links to paid attorney advertisement).
The plaintiffs are represented by Jonathan M. Jagher of Freed Kanner London & Millen LLC, and Gary E. Mason, David K. Lietz and Gary M. Klinger of Mason Lietz & Klinger LLP.
The Horizon House Data Breach Class Action Lawsuit is Jones v. Horizon House Inc., Case No. 211001767, in the Court of Common Pleas for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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