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 April 14, 2017.
- Organization as reported
- Western Health Screening, MT
- Entity type as reported
- Business Associate
- Category as reported
Theft
- Location of information as reported
- Other Portable Electronic Device
- Submission date
- April 14, 2017
- Observed by BreachRecords
- 2026-10-18 16:15 UTC (revision 14216, row:5355)
- Archived copy
- Held in the private archive (provenance)
Western Health Screening contracts with hospitals to provide onsite blood screenings at hospital-sponsored health fairs. On February 7, 2017, while one of the its employees was en route to a health fair, a portable electronic storage device (a "jump drive") containing unsecured electronic protected health information (ePHI) and five laptop computers were stolen from the employee’s car. The laptops were encrypted, but the jump drive was not. The types of ePHI involved in the breach included the names, addresses, zip codes and social security numbers of 15,326 patients. Western Health provided breach notification to HHS, affected individuals and the media. Following the breach Western Health sanctioned the employee who was involved, retrained employees, and encrypted all of its jump drives. OCR obtained assurances that Western Health implemented the corrective actions noted above.