$6.5 Million Settlement Resolves Omni Family Health Class Action Data Breach Lawsuit
Omni Family Health, a network of 39 community health centers in Kern, Kings, Tulare, and Fresno counties in California, experienced a cyberattack in 2024. A $6.5 million settlement has recently been agreed to resolve the resultant class action litigation.
Omni Family Health experienced a cyberattack in February 2024 that caused a 5-day outage of its IT systems. The cyberattack was investigated at the time; however, no evidence was found to indicate that any patient data had been compromised in the incident. On August 7, 2024, Omni Family Health was made aware that a threat actor (Hunters International) had claimed to have compromised its network and had posted data allegedly stolen in the attack on the dark web.
Omni Family Health investigated and concluded that the data was real and issued notifications to the 468,344 affected individuals, who included current and former patients and employees. Data potentially stolen in the attack included names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, health insurance information, and medical information. The affected individuals were notified about the data breach on October 10, 2024.
The first three class action lawsuits were filed in the Eastern District of California on October 20, 2024, and subsequently, 19 separate actions were filed in the Superior Court of the State of California, Kern County. All 21 actions were consolidated into a single action first in the Eastern District of California, and were then remanded to the Superior Court on January 14, 2025, with the case Pace v. Omni Family Health designated as the lead case.
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Omni Family Health denies all liability and wrongdoing and disagrees with all claims and contentions in the lawsuit. Despite believing that it had good defenses to all of the claims, Omni Family Health moved to settle the litigation to avoid the time, expense, risk, exposure, inconvenience, and uncertainty of a trial and related appeals. Class counsel evaluated the costs, risks, and uncertainty of continuing with the litigation, and based on an analysis of comparable settlements, determined that the settlement was in the best interests of all class members. The settlement has recently been granted preliminary approval by the court, and the final fairness hearing has been scheduled for February 26, 2026.
Omni Family Health has agreed to establish a $6,500,000 settlement fund, from which attorneys’ fees and expenses (approximately $2.2 million), class representative awards ($1,500 per named plaintiff, totaling $30,000), and settlement notification and administration costs will be deducted. The remainder of the settlement will be used to pay benefits to the class members.
Class members may submit a claim for reimbursement of documented, unreimbursed losses due to the data breach up to a maximum of $5,000 per class member. A claim may also be submitted for a pro rata cash payment, which has been calculated to be $105.56 per class member based on a 4% claim rate. All class members are also entitled to claim two years of single-bureau credit monitoring and identity theft protection services, and members of the California resident subclass may claim an additional pro rata cash payment of $100. The cash payments may be adjusted based on the number of valid claims received, and will be calculated after credit monitoring costs have been deducted from the settlement fund.
Omni Family Health has also agreed to implement changes to its business practices and make several security enhancements to prevent similar incidents in the future. The cost of those security enhancements will not be paid from the settlement fund. Individuals wishing to object to the settlement or exclude themselves have until December 5, 2025, to do so, and claims must be submitted by January 5, 2026.
