I have always thought HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) was a huge waste of time, money, and resources which was confirmed by a May 2015 Survey which estimates “that data breaches could be costing the industry $6 billion” and more “than 90 percent of healthcare organizations represented in this study had a data breach, and 40 percent had more than five data breaches over the past two years.” The Ponemon Institute’s “Fifth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy & Security of Healthcare Data” got data from 90 HPAA covered entities and 88 Business Associates (BAs) and included these details:
For the first time, criminal attacks are the number one cause of data breaches in healthcare. Criminal attacks on healthcare organizations are up 125 percent compared to five years ago.
In fact, 45 percent of healthcare organizations say the root cause of the data breach was a criminal attack and 12 percent say it was due to a malicious insider. In the case of BAs, 39 percent say a criminal attacker caused the breach and 10 percent say it was due to a malicious insider.
The percentage of criminal-based security incidents is even higher; for instance, web-borne malware attacks caused security incidents for 78 percent of healthcare organizations and 82 percent for BAs.
Despite the changing threat environment, however, organizations are not changing their behavior—only 40 percent of healthcare organizations and 35 percent of BAs are concerned about cyber attackers.
What a mess! And unlikely to get any better!