Michela Tindera reports:
Either hackers want your health data, or companies like health insurers can’t keep that information safe.
That’s a according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The number of annual health data breaches increased 70% to 344 over the past seven years, with 75% of the breached, lost, or stolen records – 132 million – being breached by a “hacking or IT incident,” a nebulous category created by the government that doesn’t appear to distinguish malicious theft from accidental loss.
Researchers at the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Quantitative Health reviewed over 2,000 data breaches comprising 176.4 million records that were reported to the Department of Health and Human Services between 2010 and 2017. They found that with the exception of 2015, the number of breaches increased each year.
Read more on Forbes.