Roper St Francis Healthcare is confronted with a class action lawsuit associated with an October 2020 data breach wherein patient information was purportedly stolen. The lawsuit alleges negligence for not protecting patients’ private information.
From October 14 to October 29, 2020, unauthorized persons acquired access to three Roper St Francis Healthcare employees’ email accounts. Those accounts held the protected health information (PHI) of approximately 190,000 patients. The PHI potentially compromised includes financial and medical data.
This is not the only data breach that Roper St. Francis Healthcare has encountered in the last 18 months. Before the phishing attack on October 2020, Roper St. Francis reported in September two data breaches. One was a phishing attack that impacted 6,000 people. The other was the Blackbaud
ransomware attack, which impacted about 92,963 of its patients. Before those breaches, Roper St. Francis Healthcare also reported a breach on January 29, 2010 that impacted 35,253 persons.
As stated on the lawsuit, at all applicable instances, Roper have knowledge that the data it stored was susceptible to cyberattack considering these recurring and continuing data breaches.
The Richter Firm, Slotchiver & Slotchiver, LLC, The Solomon Law Group, and Brent Souther Halversen, LLC, filed the lawsuit seeking economic and non-economic damage for the plaintiff and class members, compensatory, actual and resultant damages, punitive damages, injunctive and statutory relief, and repayment for interest, expenses, and reasonable attorneys’ service fees.
According to Attorney Brent Halversen, Roper must be held accountable for its continuing negligent behavior in permitting these preventable data security breaches from occurring and to recompense present and past patients for the damage inflicted. It is also a must for Roper to provide all patients who had their private data compromised with credit monitoring services as partial payment for the damage each has experienced, not only the few that Roper feels are the worst affected.