In this article, I posted about the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ (HHS) HITECH breach website. The website list all privacy breaches affecting 500 or more individuals. I recently went to the website to take another look at the amount of breaches. I was interested in the total number of individuals that have been affected due to privacy breaches. I exported the information into Microsoft Excel and added up each of the individual privacy breaches to come up with a shocking 3,459,108 individuals that have been affected.
It should be noted that most of the breaches were due to electronic data security issues but some also involved improper disposal of paper records and theft of paper records.
As I mentioned in this post – we are seeing a lot of security breaches even before the majority of health organizations make the switch from paper records to EHR. In order for HITECH to succeed, we need a strong emphasis on patient security right now!
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[...] Privacy breaches affect 3.4 million individuals and counting… [...]