Last year the Ponemon Institute’s Fifth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy and Security of Healthcare Data revealed a shift in the root cause of data breaches from accidental to intentional. This is worth noting for all healthcare providers, large and small. It’s not enough to provide good, current cyber security training to all of your employees, but you must improve your overall cyber security to protect your highly valuable ePHI.
FierceHealthIT wrote up a good summary on the report, read it here. But one of the most important statements was
“Small to mid-size organizations especially are vulnerable because they have limited security and privacy processes, personnel, technology, and budgets compared with their larger counterparts, the report notes.” The small and medium healthcare providers are under attack and most don’t realize just how vulnerable they are and seem to be very slow to take action. At a minimum they need a third party to perform a risk assessment to know where to start.
You can read the FierceHealthIT article here.
You can download the Ponemon report here.