clinicians.build interactive · July 28, 2026

One Vendor, Many Letters

When a hospital is breached, one organization sends the letters. When a vendor is breached, everyone who used it does — and the federal ledger records the letter-writers, never the vendor. Replay sixteen years of large breach filings and watch three vendor incidents surface as towers of other people's names.

Primary source: Becker's — health IT vendor breach exposes 425,000+ patients (Jul 2026) · AnMed update (Jul 27, 2026)
Data: HHS OCR breach portal via MIMI Labs · the 939 filings of ≥50,000 people, 2009–2025 · a clinicians.build interactive
14
filings, one month — one collections vendor (Jul 2019)
40
filings, one month — one fundraising vendor (Sept 2020)
67%
of 2023's 173M records were vendor-linked
0
times the vendor's name appears in the filings

Each dot is a breach filing. The towers are vendors.

One column per month, one dot per filing of ≥50,000 people. Red dots have a vendor in the loop. A hospital breach makes one dot; a vendor breach makes a tower. Press replay, or jump to a detonation.

Jul 2019 · AMCA Sept 2020 · Blackbaud 2023 · MOVEit Jul 2026 · this week
vendor in the loop no vendor flagged
80/20 — the builder's move

Your health system's risk register almost certainly lists vendors. It almost certainly does not map them — which systems, which data classes, which clinical workflows stop when each one goes dark. AnMed's imaging sites closed this week while its EDs stayed open; that boundary was drawn years ago by architecture, not on the day of the attack. Write the map for your own product this week: every third party in the request path, what breaks when it's gone, and who sends the letters if it leaks. If you can't fill in the last column, you've found this quarter's actual project.

😤 "This is survivorship of the reported." Yes — three times over. Only breaches of 500+ reach this file, only the ≥50,000 slice is drawn here, and the file records the report date, not the breach (AMCA's breach ran Aug 2018–Mar 2019; its tower stands in July 2019). The towers you see are the minimum version of the story. The one you can't see — Change Healthcare, ~190M people — entered OCR's ledger as a 500-person placeholder and grew for a year after this snapshot ends.
Read the vendor-breach story (Becker's) →