Dec 30
2013
Data Breaches of Protected Health Information Will Get More Frequent in 2014
Guest post by Michelle Blackmer, director of marketing, Healthcare, Informatica.
The volume of protected health information (PHI) in electronic form is exploding – both from the wholesale move from paper charts to electronic health records for capturing clinical data and with the proliferation of new sources of electronic data from networked medical devices. Additionally, IT staff have been overwhelmed by regulatory mandates, rampant technology changes (e.g., virtualization, BYOD, big data), massive application projects and flat or decreasing budgets.
This increase in electronic PHI combined with the challenges for health systems IT make it even more important for providers and non-providers to find efficient ways to secure their data. However, with malicious activity showing a consistent upward trend, absent a change to an almost maniacal leadership focus on protecting patient data and the deployment of available tools and processes as an organizational imperative, 2014 will bring even more frequent and larger breaches of PHI.
Current data security climate
Even still, many healthcare organizations are not taking the necessary steps to reduce the proliferation of unprotected PHI in non-production test and development environments. Ninety-four percent of respondents to the third annual Ponemon Institute Benchmark Survey on Patient Privacy and Data Security had at least one data breach in the past two years, and 45 percent reported having had more than five total incidents each. Even more surprising is that the leading cause for a breach is a lost or stolen computing device that houses PHI. The survey also found that:
- Unrestricted database administrator (DBA) access heightens risk: 73 percent of DBAs can view all data.
- Data compromise/theft remains rampant: 50 percent of respondents say data has been compromised or stolen by a malicious insider such as a privileged user.
- Organizations are under-coping: 68 percent have difficulty restricting user access to sensitive data, 66 percent have difficulty complying with privacy/data protection regulations and 55 percent lack confidence that they would even detect data theft/loss from their own production environments.
