Cybersecurity Continues to Haunt Healthcare – Cyber Insurance and a Legacy Data Plan are Musts

Cybersecurity Haunting Healthcare

Data breaches and insider user threats continue to plague the healthcare industry. Recent stats are a shocking reminder that cybersecurity is digging in as a major obstacle for healthcare IT teams.

A few points that underline the severity include:

  • Around 1.13 million patient records were compromised in 110 healthcare data breaches in the first quarter of 2018, according to data released May 3 in the Protenus Breach Barometer.
  • The Breach Barometer also found that it takes healthcare organizations an average of 244 days to detect a breach once it has occurred.
  • If healthcare employees breach patient privacy once, there is a greater than 20 percent chance that they will breach it again in three months’ time, and there is a greater than 54 percent chance they will do it again in one year, according to Protenus data.

Logicworks, a leading provider of cloud automation and managed services, lists five reasons why health data continues to be a cybersecurity target:

  1. Systems are old and complex
  2. Health IT is 95% Manual Work
  3. Disjointed Monitoring
  4. “We’re already HIPAA compliant”
  5. Healthcare data is extremely valuable

It’s not a surprise that cybersecurity insurance has become a must-have for every medical practice, hospital, health system and vendor. Cyber insurance covers loss and damages from hacking and ransomware, as well as accidents. While malpractice insurance may cover some issues, there usually are limits and a lot of exceptions with having only this type of coverage. As data continues to move through practices, insurers, hospitals, and labs, there is an increased risk for attack and accidental disclosure. In a recent article in Modern Medicine, HIMSS suggests that keeping the data safe is a shared responsibility.

There are numerous proactive and protective actions you can take to safeguard the valuable health data in your care — especially the legacy data you’re storing long-term to comply with record retention requirements. We’ve developed a resource of the 10 privacy and security questions you should ask your future data archiving partner to ensure your data is safe. This is a great resource if your organization is vetting out system decommissioning partners.  We also have a comprehensive security-focused white paper with numerous suggestions and action steps to consider.

Is your medical practice, hospital or health system working through security issues? (We know, who isn’t, right?) Are you shoring up disparate silos of legacy health records to button up your risk? (Again, a somewhat redundant question, but you get the point.)

Connect with our team. We can help.

Sep 18 2018

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