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Data Breach: How Well is Health Information Being Protected?
Data breaches at hospitals have recently been in the headlines:
- 1.7 million records from patients, vendors and contractors was stolen in a breach of New York City Health and Hospital Corp (HHC) information, a system of 14 hospitals. The information compromised included names, addresses, social security numbers, patients’ medical histories.
- 3600 people were affected by a data breach at a hospital in Kanahwa County, West Virginia.
- 84,000 records were compromised in a data breach of hospital information in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
And those are just three recent headlines about data breaches. The problem of weakly secured data by health care providers seems to be quite a serious and pervasive problem. The HITECH law (Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health) passed in August 2009 now requires that any data breach which affects more than 500 individuals must be reported within 60 days from the date of occurrence. Redspin recently compiled statistics on data breaches reported via HITECH in the health care industry for 2010. The number of breaches reported are surprisingly large:
- In 2010 there were 225 data breaches reported by health-care related organizations, affecting more than 6 million people
- The problem is everywhere. Breaches were reported which occurred in 43 different states, Washington DC and Puerto Rico.
- On average, 27,000 people are affected by a single breach
- The breaches are primarily driven by malicious intent — 61 percent are malicious
- 40 percent of the cases involved business associates inappropriately accessing data
Data breaches are very expensive and can cause huge headaches for those people affected. Ponemon Institute estimates that the loss of a single record costs as much as $240.
