There was a 44% month-over-month decrease in the number of reported healthcare data breaches in August 2021. 38 healthcare data breaches of 500 or more records were reported by healthcare providers, health plans, and their business associates in August. August’s reported data breaches takes the total number of healthcare data breaches in the past 12 months to 707 (Sep 2020 to August 2021), with 440 of those data breaches reported in 2021.

While there was a marked fall in the number of reported breaches, 5,120,289 healthcare records were breached across those 38 incidents, which is well above the 12-month average of 3.94 million breached records a month. The high total was largely due to two major ransomware attacks on St. Joseph’s/Candler Health System and University Medical Center Southern Nevada, which involved 2.8 million healthcare records combined.