More Than 1.1 Million Patient Records Breached During Q1 of 2018

Well, this isn’t a pretty picture. According to research by Protenus, roughly 1.3 million patient records were breached between January and March of this year. (The actual number is 1,129,744 records, for those who like to be precise.) During that quarter, the healthcare industry saw an average of at least one data breach per day, racking up 110 health data breaches during this period, according to the Protenus Breach Barometer. The researchers found that the single largest breach taking place during Q1 2018 was an intrusion involving an Oklahoma-based healthcare organization. The breach, which exposed patient billing information for 279,856 patients, resulted from an unauthorized third-party gaining access to the health system’s network. If you assume that the other breaches were also executed by external cyberattackers, think again. According to the data, healthcare staffers represented a far bigger risk of being involved with security violations. The data suggests that such insiders were most likely to illegally access data on the family members, a problem which accounted for 77.1% of privacy violations in the first quarter of this year. Accessing records on coworkers was the second most common insider-related violation, followed by accessing neighbor and VIP records. Not only that, Protenus researchers found that if a healthcare employee breaches patient privacy once, there’s a greater than 20% chance they will breach privacy again in three months’ time. Worse, th...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR EMR Security Health Care Healthcare HealthCare IT Healthcare IT Security HIPAA Breaches HIPAA News Cybersecurity Health Data Breaches Healthcare Employee Breaches Insid Source Type: blogs