Incidents Of PHI Attacks Continue To Increase

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

According to a Kaiser Permanente study, reports of large scale data breaches continue to increase.

More than 1,000 large scale data breaches were reported during the three-year period from 2010 to 2013. According to research published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, these include incidents which affected at least 500 individuals and totaled more than 29 million people.

“While electronic data security and privacy is not a problem that is unique to healthcare, individually identifiable health data cannot be easily reset or changed once it has been compromised like credit card information can, for example,” Dr. Vincent Liu of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, CA told Reuters Health. “Electronic health records and other emerging technologies for using health data have great potential to improve the delivery of high-value healthcare, however, we must ensure that our patients' data remains secure.”

iHealth Beat reports 50 percent of all breaches involved the theft of a laptop, thumb drive, or paper records. Breaches attributed to hacking accounted for only 12 percent of all breaches in 2010. In 2013, however, that number jumped to 27 percent.

“We found that as many as 30 million records were compromised in a four-year span,” Liu said. “If each of these represented records from a unique patient, it could suggest that as many as 1 of every 11 Americans' healthcare data has been compromised.”

Researchers expect the number of electronic breaches to continue to increase as technologies such as cloud-based analytics services, gene sequencing, personal health records, and other health-related technology become more popular. The study suggests healthcare organizations and lawmakers take action to both increase staff training and increase security measures.