Tift Regional Health System & Southwell Data Breach Settlement

Data Breach · Claims Open

Current Status

Claims are open. The deadline to file online or by mail is October 15, 2026, and mailed claim forms must be postmarked by that date; the Notice does not specify a cutoff time or timezone, so do not assume one. The final approval hearing is scheduled for September 14, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. Eastern Time in the Superior Court for Tift County, Georgia, and the court has not yet ruled on final approval. No payment date has been announced as of August 15, 2026. If you received a notice about the Tift data security incident, file your claim now rather than waiting on the hearing.

What Changed Recently?

The court authorized notice to the class and opened the claim process for the settlement of In re Tift Regional Health System, Inc. Data Breach Litigation, Case No. 2023CV0313, pending in the Superior Court for Tift County, Georgia. Under the agreement, Tift Regional Health System, Inc. and Southwell, Inc. will establish a $1,200,000 settlement fund, and class members can now file for cash and monitoring benefits through the settlement administrator, Simpluris.

Tift denies that it did anything wrong, and the court has not decided who is right. The parties state that they agreed to settle to avoid the cost, risk, and delay of continued litigation.

Who Qualifies?

The court defined the class as all individuals residing in the United States whose private information may have been compromised or otherwise impacted in the data security incident, including everyone who received notice of the breach. In practice, if Tift or Southwell sent you a breach notice about the August 2022 incident, you are a class member.

Excluded from the class are the judge or judges presiding over the litigation and their immediate family and staff; Tift and its officers, directors, related companies, successors, predecessors, and any entity in which Tift has a controlling interest; anyone who validly excludes themselves from the settlement; and the successors or assigns of any excluded person.

The underlying incident was a targeted cyberattack on Tift's computer systems in August 2022. According to the Notice, files that were accessed may have contained names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and medical information. Tift began notifying affected individuals in August 2023; the incident was reported to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as affecting roughly 180,142 people. We covered the notification at the time in our Tift Regional Health System data breach investigation.

How Much Can You Get?

The $1.2 million fund first pays court-approved attorneys' fees and costs, service awards, and administration expenses. What remains funds the class benefits below. Every class member is eligible for the monitoring benefit and for one of the two cash options — you choose between the cash tiers, but you do not have to give up monitoring to take cash.

• Medical identity monitoring — two years of CyEx Medical Shield Complete, which includes $1 million in medical identity theft insurance and monitors for healthcare insurance ID exposure, Medical Record Number (MRN) exposure, and unauthorized Health Savings Account spending, with access to a fraud resolution agent.
• Documented Loss Payment — reimbursement of up to $5,000 for actual, documented out-of-pocket losses traceable to the incident and incurred between August 11, 2022 and October 15, 2026. Covered examples in the Notice include losses from identity theft or fraud, fees for credit reports, credit monitoring, or credit freezes and unfreezes, the cost of replacing IDs, and postage to contact banks by mail. Expenses already reimbursed by a third party cannot be claimed.