Has your practice experienced a cyber-attack? If not, you can count your blessings and continue to take steps to protect your patients’ information and medical records. You have taken the first step by entrusting your patients’ records to Sevocity®. With Sevocity®, patient information does not reside in devices or servers in your practice. This information is encrypted and exchanged with the Sevocity data center where it is protected behind multiple layers of administrative, technical and physical safeguards.
It is quite likely that not all of your patient or sensitive information is tucked away in a secure data center, so it would be prudent to take additional cyber security steps to protect that information. When it comes to data breaches, healthcare services is the hardest hit business subsector with over 39% of all breaches. 1 36% of all breaches in 2015 included medical records.1 In fact, 4 million identities were exposed in 2015 out of the 120 data breach incidents in the health care sector. 1
TOP 10 CAUSES OF COMPROMISED PATIENT DATA2
| #1 Cyber criminals | #6 No cyber security plan |
| #2 Lost or stolen portable devices | #7 Careless use of passwords |
| #3 Failure to use encryption | #8 Unsecure Wi-Fi networks |
| #4 Work culture and habits that fail to reinforce patient data security and privacy | #9 Relying on outdated computer systems to store data |
| #5 Data security that lags behind current technology | #10 Using cloud-based services to store protected health information, identifiable information, and financial data |
Ransomware
The emerging threat of “Ransomware” (encrypting files) increased 35% in 2015 to about 1,000 attacks per day as observed by the Symantec Corporation. That number has quadrupled in the first few months of 2016 to 4,000 attacks per day. In February of this year Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles paid $17,000 ransom to regain access to their records.
Is your practice prepared for your ransomware attack?
Sources:
- Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, Volume 21, April 2016 This report is available at: https://www.symantec.com/security-center/threat-report
- 10 Things That Compromise Patient Data, Texas Medical Liability Trust, 2015. https://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=36045