The eight largest healthcare breaches of 2022 were all related to vendors.

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As healthcare breaches continue to run rampant, it is important to look for patterns.

Eight of the largest healthcare breaches were related to third-party vendors.

These included:

• A breach at Advocate Aurora Health where 3 million patients were affected by a tracking pixel tool that sent data to Google or Meta,
• A breach at a printing and mailing vendor that impacted 2.7 million patients,
• An MRI vendor breach that impacted 2 million patients, and more.

All of these breaches occurred at third-party vendors.

Some of the other vendors include debt collection firms, IT vendors, tracking tools, and other service providers.

What does this mean for your practice?

Reevaluate your vendor relationships:

• Which vendors do you need?
• Do you have sound contracts and business associate agreements in place with those necessary vendors?
• Are they communicative when issues arise?

It is essential that you put adequate protections in place to protect your patients, your practice and your reputation.

Make sure that you have sufficient firewalls, ransomware, and vulnerability testing in place. Know where your weak points are so that you can address them.

You also need to know what protections your vendors have in place.

Do you have cyber insurance? Do your vendors have cyber insurance? If not, now is the time to get a policy in place. We help our clients find cyber insurance policies to protect their businesses.

Your contracts should be clear as to what protections your vendors must have in place. Depending on the vendor and the nature of the relationship, your contracts may want to include provisions requiring cyber insurance, certain privacy and security standards, encryption, off-site backups and more.

We help our clients protect their interests and their data.

If you need help with your employment contract or other contracting needs, contact Rickard & Associates today.

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Do you need help updating your Business Associate Agreement or negotiating contracts with third-party vendors? We can help. To contact us about your Business Associate Agreement, your vendor contracts or your other legal needs, call us today.