Project Belle, LLC, a New Hampshire healthcare provider, reported a data breach affecting 840 individuals to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on September 17, 2026. The report lists email as the location of the breached information.
Project Belle’s Data Breach Investigation
Project Belle, LLC is listed on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights breach portal as a healthcare provider located in New Hampshire. The portal is the public list of breaches of unsecured protected health information that affect 500 or more people, and entities covered by HIPAA must report to it when such an incident occurs.
According to the portal entry, Project Belle submitted its breach report on September 17, 2026. The entry states that 840 individuals were affected. It classifies the type of breach as unauthorized access or disclosure and identifies email as the location of the breached information.
The portal entry is short by design. It does not describe how the unauthorized access happened, which email accounts were involved, how long the access lasted, or what categories of personal or health information were in the affected messages. Because those details have not been published in the sources reviewed for this page, this page does not guess at them.
A related federal court filing is publicly listed. A complaint captioned Cochran v. Project Belle, LLC was filed on October 1, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, according to online court docket records. This page does not rely on the complaint’s allegations, and nothing in the complaint has been confirmed by the company.
Email-related incidents in healthcare can matter because messages and attachments often hold details that patients share with their providers, such as names, contact information, appointment or billing details, and sometimes insurance or identification numbers. Whether any of that applied here has not been disclosed. Anyone who believes they may be affected should treat any letter from the company as the most reliable source for what applies to them.
Under HIPAA, covered entities generally must notify affected individuals without unreasonable delay, and no later than 60 days after discovering a breach. Notice letters usually explain what happened, what information was involved and what steps the company is taking, and they often include an offer of credit monitoring or identity protection. If you receive a letter, keep it, along with any activation code or enrollment deadline it lists.
Organizations that handle health information are expected to protect their email systems with measures such as multi-factor authentication, access monitoring and staff training on phishing. Whether such measures were in place at Project Belle has not been disclosed.
When Did This Breach Occur?
The HHS portal lists a breach submission date of September 17, 2026. The portal entry does not state when the unauthorized access began or when the company discovered it, so the dates of the underlying events have not been confirmed.
What Information Was Breached?
The HHS portal lists email as the location of the breached information and unauthorized access or disclosure as the type of breach. It does not say which kinds of personal or health information were involved. Project Belle has not publicly disclosed a specific list of affected data types in the sources reviewed for this page.
What You Can Do
If you received a notice from Project Belle, consider these steps:
- Read the notice carefully and note any enrollment deadline or activation code for free credit monitoring or identity protection.
- Place a free fraud alert on your credit file, or consider a credit freeze, with Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.
- Review explanation of benefits statements, insurance statements and bank accounts for anything you do not recognize, and check your credit reports for free at annualcreditreport.com.
- Report suspected identity theft to the Federal Trade Commission at identitytheft.gov and to your state Attorney General.
File a Data Breach Lawsuit Against Project Belle
If you received a notice about this incident, or believe your personal or health information was exposed, you may have legal options. Healthcare organizations are expected to safeguard patient information, and a class action can help hold them accountable when they fail to do so.
Contact us at Class Action U, where we’ll connect you with a lawyer skilled in class action lawsuits. If you’ve been contacted about this breach, received notice, or discovered you were impacted, fill out our quick, easy, and secure form to sign up. There is no cost to reach out to our legal partner and no obligation after speaking with someone from our team.