One of the strongest bonds that bind clinics with their patients is trust. When this bond gets broken, both parties lose. In a recent case of a cyber breach, the patients availing the services of Texas’s Touchstone Medical Imaging Center suffered the same. The cyber security losses robbed the patients of their schedules and money.

The Security Breach

Touchstone has its headquarters in Texas’s Plano. It was in the month of December 2021 that the center abruptly canceled several appointments and scheduled exams for the patients. As a reason, they cited security problems.

The center resumed the services after a while but has not yet released the complete detail about the incident that caused the interruption. According to the reports of CBSN Dallas Fort Worth, many patients expressed their concern about such an in-transparent move.

The Response

According to Sarah Hudson, a resident of North Texas, who is also a patient of the center, the authorities should have been clearer in their statements. She further added that all patients deserve an answer and the clarifications should be less ambiguous. She expressed her concern saying that in case of hacking, she would like to know about the privacy status of her information like social security number, license number, medical reports, etc.

The threat of data leaks was not the only concern for the patients availing services of this center. They were also worried about the financial issues brought upon by the particular time of the incident. The breach took place in the month of December.

Therefore, the schedules got pushed to the next month, January. January marks the beginning of a new insurance cycle. Many had to pay the dues from the previous years and other expenses. This taxed the pockets of more than most patients.

The Background

However, this incident is not an unprecedented one in eth field of healthcare. In 2019 as well, Touchstone faced a similar crisis in Florida, for which it had to pay a penalty of almost $3 million.

Besides the preliminary statement, Touchstone has not come up with an in-depth explanation for this incident so far. However, the center has informed its beneficiaries that they have restarted their services once again.

Security is one of the primary concerns of the healthcare sector. Without guaranteeing the safety of all the information and records the clinics cannot offer secured services. At Sepstream®, we make sure that all your information remains protected. Breach of security is not even an option for us. Multilayer encryption makes our data storage one of the safest places to keep the data.