Exec Tells Congress That New Health Data Threats Are Emerging

A senior security executive with a major academic health system has told Congress that in addition to attacks by random attackers, healthcare organizations are facing new threats which are changing the health security landscape. Erik Decker, chief security and privacy officer with the University of Chicago Medicine, testified on behalf of the Association for Executives in Healthcare Information Security in mid-June. He made his comments in support of the reauthorization of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act, whose purpose is to improve the U.S. public health and medical preparedness for emergencies. In his testimony, Decker laid out how the nature of provider and public health preparedness has changed as digital health technology has become the backbone of the industry. He described how healthcare information use has evolved, explaining to legislators how the digitization of healthcare has created a “hyper-connected” environment in which systems such as EHRs, revenue cycle platforms, imaging and ERP software are linked to specialty applications, the cloud and connected medical devices. He also told them about the increasing need for healthcare organizations to share data smoothly, and the impact this has had on the healthcare data infrastructure. “There is increasing reliance on these data being available, and confidential, to support these nuanced clinical workflows,” he said. “With the adoption of this technology, the technical ecosystem has exploded i...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Cloud Computing Connected Health Digital Health EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR Health Care Healthcare Healthcare CIO HealthCare IT Healthcare IT Security Healthcare Leadership HIPAA Breaches Chief Pr Source Type: blogs