Quest Confirms Patient Records Taken in Quanum Breach — SkimNews
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Quest Diagnostics disclosed in an SEC 8-K filing that it learned Wednesday of a cyberattack targeting Quanum, a lab-testing system used to order tests and handle billing.
- Quanum stores patient health and medical records plus associated diagnostic and billing data, and Quest said the unauthorized access included accessing “certain patient records.”
- Quest Diagnostics notified law enforcement and is investigating what specific data was taken, but has not disclosed when the breach began, whether a hacking group made demands, or how many patients and healthcare customers were affected.
- Quanum is used by about 500,000 clinicians in thousands of locations across North America, while the total number of health records on the platform remains unclear.
- Quest Diagnostics said this was its second known major data breach in a decade, following the loss of 11.9 million patient records in a 2019 cyberattack on a third-party billing company.
- Quest Diagnostics said some patients’ protected health information was taken, but its website notice contains “noindex” code, making the disclosure harder for search engines to list.
Why it matters: Some patients have already had protected health information taken, while Quest Diagnostics still has not identified how many people were affected or which data categories were involved. After its 2019 loss of 11.9 million records, the unresolved exposure leaves patients and the roughly 500,000 clinicians using Quanum without a clear account of this breach’s scope.
Ask SkimNews
