As Medicare Advantage (MA) plans prepare to expand their supplemental benefits in 2020 to cover even more non-medical services, players from a growing number of industries are hopping on board. That includes ride-hailing companies such as Lyft (Nasdaq: LYFT) and Uber (NYSE: UBER), which say seniors are a driving force in their health care businesses. The competitors have been vocal about the need to tackle social determinants of health, with MA plans becoming an increasingly popular vehicle to make it happen.

Two medical companies have revealed massive data breaches. Nearly 20 million patients have been exposed because of it. Jon Moore, SVP & Chief Risk Officer provides perspective on the impact of this third-party data breach. 

A data breach at American Medical Collection Agency has affected nearly 12 million patients who had lab tests performed by Quest Diagnostics. The incident, which appears to be the biggest health data breach to be revealed so far in 2019, exposed financial data, Social Security numbers and certain medical information, the lab test firm reports. In a statement Monday, Secaucus, New Jersey-based Quest Diagnostics says AMCA, based in Elmsford, New York, informed the lab testing firm in May that an “unauthorized user” had access to AMCA’s system containing personal information the collections agency received from various entities, including from Quest.

Other developing issues could affect privacy and security rules, says Wes Morris, CHP, CIPM, HCISPP, Managing Principal Consultant, Clearwater, Mountain Home, ID. For example, opium reporting rules are evolving differently state by state, creating a challenge for HIM professionals to understand which rules apply to them and how they sync with federal regulations, says Morris, who also co-chairs the Privacy and Security Practice Council.”…I would encourage the industry as a whole to,  first and foremost, make sure what you have in place is working for you and meeting the needs of two groups: patients, whose information you are there to protect and manage, and the staff of your organization, who have to work within your policies and procedures.”

Cybersecurity continues to be an important and hot topic in health care, especially in the HTM community. TechNation quizzed some industry experts and educators about cybersecurity in search of information and tips to help readers. Participating in the roundtable discussion on cybersecurity are Medigate Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Langer, Cynerio CEO and Founder Leon Lerman, Clearwater Chief Risk Officer and Senior Vice President of Professional Services Jon Moore, CyberMDX Vice President of Business Development Safi Oranski, Nuvolo Vice President of Product Marketing Ben Person, Texas State Technical College-Waco Associate Professor of Biomedical Equipment Technology Garrett Seeley and Extreme Networks Director of Healthcare Solutions Bob Zemke.

As many as 1.6 million individuals in Puerto Rico may have their health information exposed because of a snafu by an information technology vendor. Inmediata Health Group operates a database that captures current cyber threats and assesses, remediates and monitors risks to critical business systems and data. In January, Inmediata became aware that protected data was viewable online because a web page setting permitted search engines to index internal webpages used for business operations.

An all-too-common type of data security mistake – a misconfigured IT setting – has landed a Puerto Rico-based clearinghouse and cloud software services provider at the top of federal regulators’ list of largest health data breaches so far this year, in an incident impacting nearly 1.6 million individuals.

A former Hewlett Packard Enterprise worker has pleaded guilty in federal court to intentionally damaging an Oregon Medicaid system and causing it to fail a few days after he was laid off by the vendor.

The Department of Health and Human Services reduced its fines for violations of HIPAA — the law requiring health care industries to protect customer data, according to a notice this week in the Federal Register. Driving the news: The new rules reduce a maximum fine of $1.5 million to a maximum fine of $250,000.