Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush, LLC

On February 10, 2014, an unknown party gained unauthorized access to the personal email account of a physician at Midwest Orthopaedics at Rush, the covered entity (CE), disclosing protected health information (PHI) that affected approximately 1,256 individuals. The emails contained electronic PHI including names, physicians' surgical schedules, surgical descriptions, codes, dates and instructions. The CE provided breach notification to HHS, affected individuals, and the media. The CE also conducted an investigation and determined the root cause of the breach. Additionally, the CE disabled the physician’s Gmail account to which the PHI was sent, and trained the physician and his staff on the use of the secure email. The CE revised email procedures by eliminating all external email addresses from the CE's distribution list of physicians and support staff and discontinued the use of outside email addresses for sending or receiving of PHI. OCR obtained documented assurances that the CE implemented the corrective actions listed above.