The rise in healthcare data breach
Year after year, data breach is becoming an increasingly common problem in the healthcare industry. According to HIPAA Journal report, 2019 was one of the worst years for healthcare data breaches. Data breaches impacted small to large size hospitals, medical lab testing companies, and many health care service providers. Hacking and IT incidents dominated the reasons for data breaches. In 2019 alone, ransomware attacks have significantly increase from past years. However, phishing still remains a consist problem. Healthcare data breach affected disproportionate number of healthcare providers. The cost of data breach to these healthcare companies upwards of millions of dollars.
Why healthcare data is valuable.
Selling and trading health information in the dark web is a very lucrative business for hackers. Hackers can make a few hundred dollars and upwards to millions of dollars depending on the value of the data. A patient’s health information contains valuable information about the patients’ medical history and identifying data that could be used for malicious purpose. The long-term implications of medical data breach are identity theft and other fraudulent acts. It is no surprise that the high value of medical records makes stealing patient health information an attractive and lucrative business that is done exclusively behind a keyboard and monitor.
Small business vulnerability to data breach.
Small business and medical clinics who don’t have full support of a knowledgeable IT team can be vulnerable to data breach. Medical clinics who don’t invest in upgrading computing infrastructure are at a much greater risk of falling victim to data breach. For example, some computers may still be running outdated software that are no longer being patch for security vulnerability. Small business and medical clinics can solve some data security problems and reduce their in-house IT expenses by moving from on-site to cloud-based data storage. This approach gives business and medical clinics who do not have the IT resources to stay up to date with latest computer infrastructure to safeguard their data. It also removes the need to maintain and update a costly IT infrastructure to meet the security rigor set by HIPPA.
Here at Datafied our data specialist can help your business get up to date with computer resources to secure your data. We specialize in medical records management, managing and storing sensitive patient data, and healthcare data security. If you questions or concerns about your current data needs and how Datafied can help you achieve healthcare data compliance, give our specialist a call at 800-765-7510.
