Star Wars Is Really About Protecting Patient Data (Yes It Is)

By MATT SEAGER Star Wars may be a light-hearted adventure film series at its core, but that hasn’t stopped professionals and academics from extracting some real-world lessons from the series. A couple of prominent examples include a thesis on the economic impact of building the Death Star and NPR’s political science analysis of the inner workings of the galactic senate. With the latest Star Wars film, Rogue One, it’s the healthcare IT industry’s turn to take a crack at the known universe’s most popular space saga.  Be forewarned: the following analysis includes spoilers from the new film. A key component the plot is that the Empire suffers a series of data breaches that have a catastrophic impact on the organization. The connection to the healthcare industry should already be clear. Even with improving safeguards, over 11 million individuals were affected by healthcare data breaches perpetrated by cyber-attacks in 2016. We can learn from the Empire’s mistakes by looking at the film’s three most prominently featured security measures, and how a real-world organization can do better than Darth Vader when it comes to protecting sensitive information. Incident response. Early in the film, it is revealed that a traitor has released protected data. Intentional wrongdoing from within a healthcare organization is rare, but we do know that most real-world data breaches also come from an internal source—employee error. The Empire’s approach to this initial breach is...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Tech Uncategorized Source Type: blogs