A Letter from our Practice Administrator Regarding a Potential Data Breach

We are posting this to inform you of a potential breach of your personal information that occurred between August 15th, 2024 and October 17th, 2024. A team member without a valid need to access your records may have accessed your information. While we believe there was no malicious intent during this access, we wanted to provide notice of incident so you can take appropriate steps to protect your personal information and to inform you of what action has been taken.

This issue came to light on October 9th, 2024 by our business partner's electronic records system performed an internal audit and flagged suspicious activity. After our thorough investigation and while working with said business partner, we confirmed that some records were accessed with no medical necessity. Appropriate corrective action has been taken per our practice's policies, resulting in the termination of the team member involved and updated HIPPA training for current and future employees.

While you are not required to take any action, we suggest that you monitor your credit and personal information for any suspicious activity. Please call the toll-free number at the end of this notification to find out if you were listed in this breach.

If you are identified as someone who was part of the breach, Gastrointestinal Associates of Northeast Tennessee will reimburse you for the cost of a credit check through Equifax, which is one of the three major credit reporting bureaus. Again, you must first call the toll-free number at the end of this notification to see if you qualify.

You can obtain this credit check for approximately eleven to sixteen dollars ($11-$16) by contacting Equifax at 1-866-493-9788. If your Equifax credit check shows that an account has been fraudulently established using your identity since August 15h, 2024, Gastrointestinal Associates of Northeast Tennessee will provide Equifax credit monitoring to you as a courtesy and free of charge for 12 months.

In addition, you may consider taking the following steps to protect yourself:

• Place a fraud alert on your credit report by contacting one of the three major credit bureaus. Once confirmed, the other bureaus will also place alerts on your account.
• Equifax: 1-800-525-6285, www.equifax.com
• Experian: 1-888-EXPERIAN (397-3742), www.experian.com
• TransUnion: 1-800-680-7289, www.transunion.com
• Order and review your credit reports to identify any unauthorized activity.
• Continue monitoring your credit reports regularly.

Protecting our patients’ privacy is very important to us and will continue to do everything we can to correct this situation and monitor access to our patient' records. We apologize for any inconvenience or concern this may cause, but we believe it is important for you to be fully informed of any potential risk resulting from this incident.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact Gastrointestinal Associates of Northeast Tennessee at:

Toll-Free: 1-833-818-3700

310 N. State of Franklin Rd.

Johnson City, TN 37604