Senator Mark Warner calls on HHS to act to prevent breaches of medical imaging

PARCA eNews – Nov. 11, 2019 – In the wake of a report by ProPublica and German public broadcaster Bayerischer Runkfunk in September showing that millions of medical images were vulnerable to hackers, the US Senate Cybersecurity Caucus heads by Mark Warner, D-Virginia is asking the Department of Health and Human Services to explain why nothing has been done about it.

In a letter to the Office for Civil Rights, Senator Warner accuses the agency of doing little to address this potentially gaping whole in patient privacy. In making the case for increased urgency in addressing the threat, Warner wrote, "These reports indicate egregious privacy violations and represent a serious national security issue – the files may be altered, extracted, or used to spread malware across an organization."

The letter went on to ask five questions of the OCR aimed at compelling the agency to explain its inaction and to describe what it plans to do about it.