Health Care: Rampant Number of Data Breaches Raises Concern

Last Friday, when reviewing the news headlines for the day, these three stood out:

O.C. patients’ medical records compromised — 21,300 patients at Jude Medical Center in Fullerton and Mission Hospital facilities in Laguna Beach and Mission Viejo were inadvertantly made publicly available because of incorrect security settings.

St. Joseph Health System warns of patient data breach — 10,000 patients in Santa Rosa, Petaluma and Napa had their personal health information records inadvertantly made publicly available

NYC Hospital Data Theft Affects 1.7 Million Patients — 1.7 million New York City patients, staff members and others affiliated with four Bronx hospitals were affected by a data breach that has taken two months to report

It’s just another day in the world of security and health care records.  Data breaches in health care have become all too common.  Over the last year, health care data breaches have affected more than 19 million people.

Daniel W. Berger, President and CEO  of IT Security company Redspin, said that “Information security data breaches in healthcare have reached epidemic proportions – the problem is widespread and accelerating.  Incidents have been reported in nearly all 50 states and the total number of records breached increased 97% in 2011 as compared to 2010.”

And now there is a  mind-boggling statistic from Ponemon Institute.  In a recent study they found that over the last year, 91 percent of small healthcare organizations suffered a data breach and 23 percent suffered at least one patient identity theft.

Of the small healthcare organizations surveyed:

• 52 percent thought their data security procedures are ineffective
• 55 percent were required to notify patients over the last 12 month because of data breaches
• 70 percent said they aren’t sure they have enough budget to meet risk management, compliance, and governance requirements

Berger told InformationWeek that “It makes logical sense that as more protected health information is digitized, it becomes structured data maintained in databases and is easier to access and transfer to a laptop or portal storage device, which then gets lost or stolen.  Now you can have one million patient records stolen in one incident as opposed to someone walking out the door with a file folder of 30 patient records.”

Larry Ponemon, Chairman at the Ponemon Institute, commented that  “Around 70 percent say their organizations don’t have — or they don’t know if they have — Their [continued] orientation to paper files, ad hoc use of mobile technologies … just creates an environment that’s a perfect storm for data loss and theft”