The State Attorney General’s Office says they’ve reached a two million dollar settlement with Cottage Health System over charges they failed to implement basic safeguards to protect patient medical information.
The AG’s office says the lack of reasonable safeguards violated state and federal laws, and made medical records for more than 50,000 patients available online through a pair of data breaches.
The settlement requires the Santa Barbara based healthcare organization to take steps to protect patient information from unauthorized access or disclosure. In addition to the two million dollar penalty, it also calls for Cottage to designate an employee as Chief Privacy Officer.
