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As hospitals look to cash in on government incentives for meaningful use of electronic health records starting in 2011, they’re leaving themselves vulnerable to $6 billion lost a year to data breaches industrywide, according to a benchmark study by the Ponemon Institute privacy and data-management research firm.
The survey was sponsored by ID Experts, a security consulting firm and maker of RADAR (Risk Assessment, Documentation and Reporting), a cloud-based risk-management program.
For the study, Ponemon Institute interviewed 211 senior-level managers at 65 health care organizations.
”A majority of the organizations concluded that they don’t have the resources, the procedures nor the confidence to detect data breaches,” Doug Pollack, vice president of strategy for ID Expert, told eWEEK.
The Ponemon Institute and ID Experts decided to carry out the study to find out how the Obama administration‘s HITECH Act governing electronic medical records and patient privacy would affect the amount of data breaches, he explained.
Enacted in 2009, the HITECH Act requires any organization that has experienced a privacy breach to inform affected individuals, the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the media if the breach exposed information for more than 500 individuals. HHS can be notified annually for breaches affecting less than 500 people.
”At this point one would hope to see that health care organizations have
improved information security practices and come into compliance with
HITECH now that it’s been more than one year since it was enacted;
instead we found enormous vulnerabilities,” Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute, said in a statement.
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