Data breaches threaten healthcare organizations from all angles -- from hackers, thieves and forgetful employees -- and touch all facets of IT infrastructure. Updated HIPAA rules make organizations responsible for the actions of their business associates, too. Healthcare IT security is a daunting task, but with a little planning, it's not an impossible one.
Personal health information is worth 50 times more to thieves than credit card or Social Security numbers, so it's no surprise that healthcare organizations are prone to data breaches. Preventing them is difficult, and so is mitigating the damage they can cause. Here experts discuss how organizations can avoid breaches and a nonprofit that suffered a breach in 2011 explains how it responded.
Healthcare is moving cautiously into cloud computing, virtualization, BYOD and other IT innovations. And there's good reason for the caution. Until an organization's IT leaders take meaningful steps to change what's typically seen as a lackadaisical privacy and security culture, the risk of patient-information loss remains high and costly.