Pamela Lewis Dolan reports:
The best defense physician practices can take against data breaches might be to keep a more watchful eye for thieves.
The Health Information Trust Alliance in August published an analysis of the 108 breaches that were reported to the Dept. of Health and Human Services from Sept. 23, 2009, to mid-July. The study found that the only type of breach experienced by every industry sector — and often the biggest cause of a breach — was theft. Health plans and physician practices were the biggest targets.
The analysis found that 68 of the 108 reported breaches were the result of theft. Of those thefts, 24 were at physician practices and involved a total of 318,478 patient records (www.hitrustcentral.net/blogs/ht/archive/2010/08/02/update-an-analysis-of-hhs-breach-data.aspx).
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There are so many qualifications or ‘maybe’s’ that needed to be inserted in the study when attempting to draw any conclusions that it’s hard to know where to start. As just one example, entities are probably much more likely to promptly notice or detect theft of devices than they are to recognize that their network has been compromised by malware. All it would take is one large insurance company to discover malware had compromised their system and data were flying out to totally skew the data in terms of records compromised. Indeed, my nightmare is that most databases have already been compromised but the compromises have not been detected.
So while theft is certainly a problem, and one could reasonably argue that there really is no excuse in this day and age to have portable devices with unencrypted data stolen from vehicles, beaches disclosed to HHS under their harm threshold may not be giving us an accurate impression as to the extent of different types of threats. What the data do show, however, and consistent with other sectors, is that business associates often contribute to or are responsible for breaches.