Iowa among 12 state AGs suing Indiana medical data company over breach

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Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller is among a dozen state attorneys general that filed a lawsuit this week against a medical records company in connection with a 2015 data breach that put millions of patient records at risk, Benefits Pro reported. The lawsuit is part of a growing trend of state enforcement of consumer and data privacy laws, and the first such AG suit under HIPAA — the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 — which requires companies to protect the privacy of patient information. The civil suit was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana against Fort Wayne-based Medical Informatics Engineering Inc. over a 2015 data breach during which hackers accessed the personal patient information of more than 3.9 million individuals stored in an electronic medical records database for dozens of institutions that use its WebChart app.