The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation has ordered that all of the lawsuits that have been filed related to a data breach at American Medical Collection Agency be consolidated into one case that will be heard before Judge Madeline Cox Arleo of the District of New Jersey.
To date, there have been more than 40 class-action suits filed, against AMCA as well as the healthcare providers, whose customer information was compromised when someone gained unauthorized access to the collection agency’s web payments portal for more than eight months. More than 25 million individuals have had their information compromised as a result of the breach.
AMCA is based close to New Jersey, in Elsmford, N.Y., and two of the other defendants — Quest Diagnostics and Bio-Reference Laboratories Inc., are based in The Garden State.
A copy of the panel’s ruling can be accessed by clicking here.
Some of the defendants had sought to have all the cases consolidated into one multi-district litigation, while others thought to keep the cases separate on a lab-by-lab basis. While admitting that it does not normally like to “bring together actions involving competing defendants,” the amount of overlap in factual issues, as well as the fact that everything stems from the same breach at AMCA, the panel decided to put all the eggs into one basket. Consolidating everything into one case will also make coordinating and obtaining information from AMCA’s bankruptcy filing more efficient, the panel said.
As a result of the breach, AMCA’s parent company, Retrieval-Masters Credit Bureau, has filed for bankruptcy protection. At the same time, one former customer of AMCA and the state of Indiana are seeking to have the company liquidate its assets
