Virtua Medical Group Data Breach (2015)

Virtua Medical Group (VMG) announced today that in early January 2016, one of its transcription vendors unintentionally caused certain patient transcription records to become viewable on the internet if searched with a search engine. Each year, VMG creates patient records for each of its 750,000 patient visits, and this incident involved considerably less than 1% of those visits. Only certain patients treated from 2011 to January, 2016 at Virtua Gynecologic Oncology Specialists, Medford Surgical Services, and Virtua Pain and Spine were affected. VMG first learned of this incident on January 21, 2016, and immediately began a thorough internal investigation. VMG determined that the transcription vendor had a server that had been unintentionally misconfigured during an upgrade, allowing the transcription documents to be viewable by using a search engine on the internet. VMG immediately had the vendor remove the patient information from the server, and VMG confirmed that patient information was no longer viewable. VMG also took action to have the records removed from search engines.