Six Hinds County residents are suing the parent company of River Region Medical Center and six of its hospitals in Mississippi over the wide-ranging theft of personal information the hospital chain reported in August.
In a suit filed Sept. 11 in federal court in Jackson, Braquelle Lawson, Ramonica Manney, Okayla Williams, Christopher Williams, Melissa Cooper and Joyce Bass said they had personal information stolen while hospitalized at facilities owned by Community Health Systems, including River Region.
Names addresses, birthdates, phone numbers, and Social Security numbers were hacked from company-managed databases in a highly-organized cyber attack from somewhere inside China in or around April and June, according to regulatory filings from the Franklin, Tenn.-based chain. The company has offered to pay for identity theft protection for one year for the 4.5 million patients over five years’ time believed to have had information stolen.
Similar class action suits against the hospital operator were filed in Texas and New Mexico. As in those cases, the one in Mississippi said CHS didn’t notify patients in a timely manner and asks to order the company pay restitution for any losses from identity theft, consumer credit protection and insurance.
Lawson is named in the suit as having been a patient at River Region, on March 8, 2013, and at Central Mississippi Medical Center, three days earlier. Fellow plaintiffs received care at different hospitals at various times — Manney, at Madison River Oaks Hospital, on Aug. 13, 2013; Okayla Williams and Christopher Williams, at River Oaks Hospital, on Jan. 15, 2013; Cooper, at Crossgates River Oaks Hospital, numerous times in the past five years; and Bass, at Natchez Community Hospital, in 2012.
Each suffered “emotional distress and economic harm” as a result of the data breach, the suit said.
Awards to participants in the class action case are subdivided between each hospital named and limited to between $100 and $1,000, plus legal and other fees, according to an amended complaint filed in the case.
Attorney Brad Clanton, one of two representing the plaintiffs, said Wednesday it was undetermined if cases concerning the data breach filed elsewhere would be combined in one jurisdiction or not.
Community Health is the nation’s second-largest hospital chain in the U.S. It owns, leases or operates 207 hospitals in 29 states, including 13 acute care hospitals in Mississippi.