Advocate Aurora Health and Intermountain Healthcare join a growing list of healthcare organizations hit by large-scale cybersecurity breaches against third-party vendor Elekta.
The two giant health systems announced Friday they had reported data breaches through their business dealings with the Sweden-based cancer care device and clinical management firm to HHS. The attack exposed data at more three dozen health systems.
Elekta notified Advocate that hackers compromised a network server containing personal health information for more than 68,000 patients, Advocate revealed to HHS on Friday. The breach occurred at seven Advocates facilities in Illinois, the hospital company disclosed.
Intermountain received notice from Elekta on May 17 that one of its servers had been hacked, leaving personal information for as many as 28,000 people vulnerable to access by unauthorized individuals between April 6 and April 20, an Intermountain spokesperson said. The incident hit four Nevada clinics that use Elekta's cloud-based clinical care management system, but it didn't affect any of its sites in Idaho or in its home state of Utah.
The data compromised at Intermountain facilities includes patients' names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, demographics, insurance cards and other forms of identification, and image files that could be medical in nature, the company said in a news release..
"Unfortunately, Intermountain Healthcare cannot confirm if any specific information related to the impacted individuals was actually accessed or viewed by an unauthorized person as a result of the Elekta incident," the com
Several other health systems previously reported that the Elekta hackers gained access to patient data.
Earlier this month, Chicago-based Northwestern Memorial Healthcare announced it had experienced a data breach connected to the cyberattack on Elekta, which compromised the personal information of more than 201,000 Northwestern patients. In June, Renown Health in Reno, Nevada, disclosed a similar data breach had affected records for more than 65,000 people.
