More Than 1.1 Million Patient Records Breached During Q1 of 2018

Well, this isn’t a pretty picture. According to research by Protenus, roughly 1.3 million patient records were breached between January and March of this year. (The actual number is 1,129,744 records, for those who like to be precise.)

During that quarter, the healthcare industry saw an average of at least one data breach per day, racking up 110 health data breaches during this period, according to the Protenus Breach Barometer.

The researchers found that the single largest breach taking place during Q1 2018 was an intrusion involving an Oklahoma-based healthcare organization. The breach, which exposed patient billing information for 279,856 patients, resulted from an unauthorized third-party gaining access to the health system’s network.

If you assume that the other breaches were also executed by external cyberattackers, think again. According to the data, healthcare staffers represented a far bigger risk of being involved with security violations.

The data suggests that such insiders were most likely to illegally access data on the family members, a problem which accounted for 77.1% of privacy violations in the first quarter of this year. Accessing records on coworkers was the second most common insider-related violation, followed by accessing neighbor and VIP records.

Not only that, Protenus researchers found that if a healthcare employee breaches patient privacy once, there’s a greater than 20% chance they will breach privacy again in three months’ time. Worse, there’s a greater than 54% chance they will do so again in a years’ time. That’s a pretty nasty form of compounding risk.

Not only that, do healthcare institutions catch breaches right away? According to Protenus research, it takes healthcare organizations an average of 244 days to detect breaches once they take place. As readers know, some of these events involve information being exposed to the Internet, offering private information to the public via an unprotected interface. Also pretty ugly, and also a source of lousy PR for the organization.

This research is a sobering follow-up to the company’s year-end report for 2017. Last year, according to Protenus research, there was an average of one health data breach per year in 2017. The 407 incidents it identified affected 5,579,438 patient records.

The largest breach taking place in last year involved a rogue insider, a hospital employee, who inappropriately accessed billing information on 697,800 patients. The rest of the top 10 largest data breaches largely sprang from insider errors.

Wow. If it wasn’t evident already, it’s pretty clear now that healthcare organizations need to tighten up their internal data security measures and training substantially.

While there will always be some folks who want to snoop on celebrity records to find imaging medical information on their ex, and some who plan to sell the information outright, a greater number simply need to be reminded what the rules are. (Or so I assume and fervently hope.)

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

1 Comment

  • I’m often surprised by how little training is provided around privacy during new hire orientation and ongoing. No one reads a handout in a packet. There should be interactive lessons, conversations, discussions around what may seem like nuances around accessing patient records. I’d be curious to see who has the most robust training program around this area for their employees. Who’s doing it right? And is that reflected in the number of breaches?

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