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 Feb. 8, 2019.
- Organization as reported
- USR Holdings, LLC, FL
- Entity type as reported
- Business Associate
- Category as reported
Hacking/IT Incident
- Location of information as reported
- Network Server
- Submission date
- Feb. 8, 2019
- Observed by BreachRecords
- 2026-10-18 16:15 UTC (revision 13540, row:4679)
- Archived copy
- Held in the private archive (provenance)
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced a $337,750 settlement with USR Holdings, LLC, a business associate in Florida, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Security Rule. OCR enforces the HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules, which set forth the requirements that covered entities (health plans, health care clearinghouses, and most health care providers), and business associates must follow to protect the privacy and security of protected health information (PHI). The HIPAA Security Rule establishes national standards to protect and secure our health care system by requiring administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronic PHI (ePHI). The settlement resolves a breach investigation concerning the deletion of ePHI by an unauthorized third party. “Health care entities need to ensure that they are proactively monitoring who is in their information systems, and that they have backup procedures in place to be able to create exact copies of the electronic protected health information they hold, in the event health information is held for ransom or deleted,” said OCR Director Melanie Fontes Rainer. “Effective cybersecurity includes being able to restore access to electronic health information following a cybersecurity attack, so there is no interruption in the provision of health care.” OCR initiated an investigation following the receipt of a breach report filed by USR in February 2019, which reported that from August 23, 2018, through December 8, 2018, a database containing the ePHI of 2,903 individuals was accessed by an unauthorized third party/parties who were able to delete ePHI in the database. OCR’s investigation found potential violations of the HIPAA Security and Privacy Rules, including failures to conduct an accurate and thorough risk analysis to determine the potential…