BATON ROUGE, LA – Louisiana
Attorney General Jeff Landry has joined 11 other state attorneys general in
filing a lawsuit against Medical Informatics Engineering, Inc. and
NoMoreClipboard, LLC (collectively “MIE”), a web-based electronic health record
company.
In their bipartisan effort to pursue a Health Insurance
Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) related data breach, General Landry
and his colleagues allege that MIE violated provisions of HIPPA as well as
state claims including Unfair and Deceptive Practice laws, Notice of Data
Breach statutes, and state Personal Information Protection Acts.
“When personal information gets into the wrong hands, it
can be used to commit serious financial crimes,” said General Landry. “We are
bringing this suit in an effort to protect both the patient’s personal
information and their healthcare. Our hope is that through this suit, MIE
and other companies will re-evaluate how they guard the sensitive health data
that patients have entrusted to their care.”
It is alleged that between May 7, 2015 and May 26, 2016,
hackers stole the protected health information of more than 3.9 million
individuals through hacking into WebChart, a web application run by MIE. This
information included: individual names, phone numbers, addresses, usernames,
passwords, security questions and answers, spousal information, email
addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, lab results, health
insurance policy information, diagnosis, disability codes, doctor's name,
medical conditions, and children’s names and birth statistics.
The suit was filed by the States of Louisiana, Arizona,
Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, North
Carolina, and Wisconsin in the United States District Court for the Northern
District of Indiana.
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