HHS OCR breach portal (HIPAA breaches affecting 500 or more individuals) Primary notice
Posted on the HHS Office for Civil Rights breach portal with a submission date of March 26, 2013.
- Organization as reported
- Oregon Health & Science University, OR
- Entity type as reported
- Healthcare Provider
- Category as reported
Theft
- Location of information as reported
- Laptop
- Submission date
- March 26, 2013
- Observed by BreachRecords
- 2026-10-18 16:15 UTC (revision 15436, row:6575)
- Archived copy
- Held in the private archive (provenance)
Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) has agreed to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules following an investigation by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) that found widespread and diverse problems at OHSU, which will be addressed through a comprehensive three-year corrective action plan. The settlement includes a monetary payment by OHSU to the Department for $2,700,000. OCR’s investigation began after OHSU submitted multiple breach reports affecting thousands of individuals, including two reports involving unencrypted laptops and another large breach involving a stolen unencrypted thumb drive. These incidents each garnered significant local and national press coverage. OCR’s investigation uncovered evidence of widespread vulnerabilities within OHSU’s HIPAA compliance program, including the storage of the electronic protected health information (ePHI) of over 3,000 individuals on a cloud-based server without a business associate agreement. OCR found significant risk of harm to 1,361 of these individuals due to the sensitive nature of their diagnoses. OHSU performed risk analyses in 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2013, but OCR’s investigation found that these analyses did not cover all ePHI in OHSU’s enterprise, as required by the Security Rule. While the analyses identified vulnerabilities and risks to ePHI located in many areas of the organization, OHSU did not act in a timely manner to implement measures to address these documented risks and vulnerabilities to a reasonable and appropriate level. OHSU also lacked policies and procedures to prevent, detect, contain, and correct security violations and failed to implement a mechanism to encrypt and decrypt ePHI or an equivalent alternative measure for ePHI maintained on its workstations, despite having identified this lack of encryption as a risk. “From well-publicized…