Healthcare Data Security Breaches

It seems that every day another hospital is in the news as the victim of a data breach.
Healthcare data security breaches. Healthcare data breach statistics from 2009 to 2017. Keck medicine in los angeles. Last year 510 healthcare data breaches of 500 or more records were reported which represents a 196 increase from 2018. Court of appeals in washington d c ruled that health insurance company customers can sue a provider after a data breach.
Prevention through proper security measures is paramount because victims of healthcare breaches are in fact able to sue the healthcare provider after a breach. Since this is the data breach investigations report we tend to put more focus on actual confirmed breaches. As the graph below shows aside from 2015 healthcare data breaches have increased every year since the hhs office for civil rights first started publishing breach summaries in october 2009. Although this sounds bad enough the type of data taken was highly sensitive and included records like social security numbers dates of birth and address.
But in healthcare given the hhs guidance on ransomware cases for example 41 the incidents hold higher relevance than they might in a different vertical despite the data being simply at risk rather than a confirmed compromise. A total of 78 8 million patient records were stolen. The routine is familiar individuals receive notification by e mail of the breach paired reassuringly with two free years of credit and identity monitoring. Healthcare does not parallel other industries in many respects especially in cyber security.
In the healthcare sector. A total of 78 8 million patient records were stolen. In august 2017 the u s. Perhaps one of the biggest healthcare data security breaches.
Healthcare data breaches often expose highly sensitive information from personally identifiable information such as social security numbers names and addresses to sensitive health data such as medicaid id numbers health insurance information and patients medical histories.