Mercy Iowa City, an acute care hospital and regional referral center, recently suffered data breach due to computer virus. Mercy Lowa City did not mention the number of affected individuals but the OCR data breach portal mentioned that 15,625 individuals were affected by the incident.
Mercy Iowa City came to know about computer virus on January 29. It had potentially infected some of its systems three days prior. The hospital now has secured the computer systems to prevent the spread of the virus.
“That’s a small percentage compared with the total number of patients the hospital serves”, said Margaret Reese, interim director of marketing and community relations and president of the Mercy Hospital Foundation. She said she did not know the total number of patients, adding that “it would be a huge number when you consider all of the many services.”
Internal investigation is carried out by forensics firm. Capturing personal data was the main motive of the computer virus. Thus it is believed that data breach has occurred.
Reese said Mercy has been working with federal law enforcement on its investigation. The hospital’s release said current safeguards have been enhanced to protect sensitive data. Reese said she could not comment on what the enhancements were.
According to the reports, unauthorized access to patients records by outside entity has resulted into the incident. which did not affect all Mercy Hospital and Mercy Clinic patients.
According to the statement, “Mercy deeply regrets any inconvenience this may have caused our patients. To help prevent something like this from happening in the future, we have enhanced our existing technical safeguards to protect patient information.”
Affected information included names, dates of birth, addresses, treatments, diagnoses, medication lists, names of health insurers, and health insurance policy numbers. Social Security numbers may also have been accessed for some patients.
“To help prevent something like this from happening in the future, we have enhanced our existing technical safeguards to protect patient information,” stated the press release.
The hospital also created a call center dedicated to answering questions about the data security event. Mercy Iowa City mentioned that there is no evidence patient information misuse.
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