Medical software company, Medical Informatics Engineering (MIE) became the latest of a long line of companies in the health care industry to become a victim of a significant data breach. As I warned people in my USA Today column last December in which I made my predictions for the year 2015, data breaches in the health care industry will be happening with greater frequency as a result of the unfortunate combination of the health care industry in general not doing a particularly good job of protecting its data and its data being very attractive to identity thieves. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/12/20/cyber-hack-data-breach/20601043/
MIE just recently announced that its main network had been hacked on May 7th and was discovered on May 26th. The data stolen included names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers and health records, all of which put the victims of this breach in serious jeopardy of identity theft. Although the full extent of the data breach has not yet been determined, among the company’s clients are Concentra which operates more than 300 medical facilities in 38 states. Some of the other specific facilities affected include Fort Wayne Neurological Center, Franciscan St. Francis Health Indianapolis, Gynecology Center, Inc., Fort Wayne and the Rochester Medical Group.
TIPS
MIE has indicated that it will be notifying patients for whom they have mailing addresses with information about the data breach although as a supplier of medical software to institutions, it may well not have addresses on all affected individuals. If you receive an email purporting to be from MIE, you should ignore it as it is a phishing email seeking to obtain personal information from you in order to make you a victim of identity theft. MIE is not contacting affected individuals by email or text messages.
MIE is offering free credit monitoring and identity theft protection services to those people affected by the data breach. For information about the program, you can go to a special section of the company’s website by clicking on this link. http://www.mieweb.com/notice/ or you can call a special toll-free hotline established by the company to answer any questions people may have about the data breach. The number is 866-328-1987.