In a report published by Identity Theft Resource Center, the number of healthcare data breaches exceeded the number of data breaches by the financial services sector so far in 2010. According to the report, healthcare had 119 data breaches of 1,636,400 records. The financial services sector had 39 breaches of 4,451,803 records. It should be noted that the number of records for the financial services sector data breaches was 3 times the amount for healthcare.
As I mentioned in this post, I believe the number of data breaches for the healthcare sector will increase as more and more practices start to implement EMRs. Now is the time to take HIPAA Security seriously. If you haven’t performed a Risk Assessment or implemented basic steps of security, such as laptop encryption, you are just asking to be included in the reported number of healthcare data breaches.
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