94% of Hospitals Suffered Data Breaches

According to the third annual Patient Privacy and Data Security report compiled by Ponemon, healthcare data breaches are continuing to rise.

Healthcare data breaches have been rising year-to-year and, though healthcare organizations are making progress in protecting patient data, the frequency, costs, and impacts of data breaches and medical identity theft continue to rise.

As the report indicates, the statistics on healthcare data security are quite startling:

• 94% of hospitals suffered data breaches
• 45% of hospitals suffered more than 5 data breaches
• 52% of organizations experienced medical identity theft
• 21,210,439 individuals were affected by breaches in healthcare organizations in the US since 2009
• 1.85 million Americans were affected by medical identity theft in 2012
• Data breaches cost the healthcare industry $7 billion
• Data breaches cost $1.2 million per organization per breach, up from $1 million in the previous year
• The cost of medical identity theft is over $41 billion, up from around $31 billion last year
• 46% of breaches were the result of a lost or stolen computing device (the top reason for a breach)
• 46% of organizations don't ensure personally-owned devices are secure under BYOD

The report indicates that healthcare organizations continue to lack budget or resources to prevent and detect data breaches, to minimize the impact of breaches, and to proactively improve privacy & security. With the impact of data breaches being so severe, organizations need to put even more pressure on proactive security measures.

ID Experts President Rick Kam notes:

"In order for the trend to shift, organizations need to commit to this problem and make significant changes. Otherwise, as the data indicates, they will be forced to cope with continual operational disruption."

Learn more from the study here.