LabCorp Lawsuit Says Company Mismanaged Data Breach

Patients have filed a class action LabCorp lawsuit claiming that the healthcare information company mishandled their recent data breach.

In June, medical test provider LabCorp made a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission which revealed that patient information had been compromised in a data breach that occurred between Aug. 1, 2018 and Mar. 30, 2019. The data breach reportedly compromised patient names, birth dates, addresses, providers, and balance information and affected millions of customers.

Reports say 11.9 million customers reportedly had their personal information compromised, while the banking and credit card information of around 200,000 consumers was compromised.

LabCorp touts itself as the “world’s leading health care diagnostics company”. The company released a statement on the issue on June 10, informing the public that information was compromised through third party collection agency American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA).

Plaintiffs in a recent LabCorp class action lawsuit claim that the company and its bill vendor AMCA did not warn patients about the breach in a timely fashion. AMCA reportedly should have discovered the breach earlier and, when it told LabCorp, the company reportedly should have informed patients right away. Quest Diagnostics was accused of similar lack of response to a data breach impacting millions.

“Although LabCorp should have known of the data breach no later than March 2019, and although AMCA knew of it far earlier than that, neither took any steps to notify patients whose information was affected until June 4, 2019, at which point LabCorp only did so through an SEC filing,” the patients said in the lawsuit.

Fraud Protection

Because consumers did not know that their information was compromised, they allegedly were unable to take immediate steps to protect against fraud, identity theft, and financial injury.

The patients also claim that LabCorp should have better protected patient information in their databases. Medical databases are allegedly “especially valuable” to data-stealing criminals and these databases experience “disproportionately higher instances of computer theft”, according to the patients. Based on these risks, LabCorp allegedly should have known that they were not safe from a breach and should have taken better care when protecting consumer information.

AMCA reportedly will be offering 24 months of credit monitoring to any patients who had their credit card information or Social Security number compromised by the breach. The AMCA has not made any statements about who is affected by the breach, but reportedly remains committed to its cyber security and the privacy of its customers.

“We hired a third-party external forensics firm to investigate any potential security breach in our systems, migrated our web payments portal services to a third-party vendor and retained additional experts to advise on, and implement, steps to increase our systems’ security,” the AMCA said in a statement to Krebson Security. “We remain committed to our system’s security, data privacy and the protection of personal information.”

As a result of the data breach, LabCorp reportedly ceased sending collection requests to AMCA and any pending requests with the agency have reportedly been halted.

The Class Action LabCorp Lawsuit is Villarreal, et al. v. American Medical Collection Agency Inc., et al., Case No. 7:19-cv05340 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The TCA AMCA Data Breach Investigation is now open! If you were a patient at LabCorp, Quest, or another lab, and received notice that you were affected, submit your information here.

Join a Free LabCorp Data Breach Class Action Lawsuit Investigation

If you are a LabCorp patient who has received bills from American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA), you may qualify to join this LabCorp class action lawsuit investigation.

Learn More

This article is not legal advice. It is presented
for informational purposes only.