More Than 3 Million Patient Records Breached During Q2 2018

A new study by data security vendor Protenus has concluded that more than 3 million patient records were breached during the second quarter of 2018, in a sharp swing upward from the previous quarter with no obvious explanation. The Protenus Breach Barometer study, which drew on both reports to HHS and media disclosures, found that there were 143 data breach incidents between April and June 2018, affecting 3,143,642 million patient records. The number of affected records has almost tripled from Q1 of this year, when 1.13 million records were breached. During this quarter, roughly 30% of privacy violations were by healthcare organizations that had previously reported a data breach. The report suggests that it is because they might not have identified existing threats or improved security training for employees either. (It could also be because cyberattackers smell blood in the water.) Protenus concluded that among hospital teams, an investigator monitors around 4,000 EHR users, and that each was responsible for an average of 2.5 hospitals and 25 cases each. The average case took about 11 days to resolve, which sounds reasonable until you consider how much can happen while systems remain exposed. With investigators being stretched so thin, not only external attackers but also internal threats become harder to manage. The research found that on average, 9.21 per 1,000 healthcare employees breached patient privacy during the second quarter of this year. This is up from 5.08 emplo...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR Healthcare HealthCare IT Healthcare IT Security HIPAA Breaches HIPAA General Hospitals Health Data Privacy Health Data Security HHS Insider Health Data Breaches Insider Source Type: blogs