Adventist Health System/Florida Hospital Celebration Data Breach (2011)

Adventist Health System faces a class action lawsuit seeking damages for failure to safeguard the HIPAA-protected information of 763,000 patients at several of its hospitals in Florida. At the heart of the lawsuit is a breach that involved a former emergency department worker of Florida Hospital Celebration. Over a two-year period from 2009 to 2011, the worker improperly accessed the electronic records of more than 763,000 patients treated at several Florida Hospital locations and sold personal information on about 12,000 patients to a co-conspirator, law enforcement officials say. That information was used to solicit legal and chiropractic services for patients involved in motor vehicle accidents, according to law enforcement officials (see: Prison Time for Health Data Theft).