Medical IT Support: 3 Common Reasons for Medical Data Breaches

By Comlink Solutions

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medical it

06

Sep

Medical IT

You’d expect a medical or healthcare institution’s classified information would be as protected as their patients’ health is protected. Patients trust the best of their health to clinics and hospitals – it’s only reasonable to also trust the security of your personal information, right?

Unfortunately, you have to think again.

In 2016, It was accounted that over 4,149 individual breaches were reported across all industries (not limited to the medical industry alone). This resulted to over 4.2 billion records exposed.

But here’s why you should be worried:

A portion – estimated roughly 9.2% of the 4 billion aforementioned records are from the medical industry.

This accounts to an estimate of 442 million of confidential health care records exposed without any patient authorization.

Without a proper Medical IT Support to provide good security, your patient’s records could be next.

Why is the medical industry being a hot target?

The medical industry is a wide market. It ranges even from just a single-physician clinic, like beauty or dental clinics, to full-range hospitals or even national pharmaceutical laboratories.

It’s difficult to pinpoint every specific reason why the medical industry is experiencing great cyber threats but we can only list down three major, generic factors that affect all healthcare clinics. All of which can be mitigated by a Medical IT Support team.

Medical IT: 3 Common Reasons for Medical Data Breaches

  1. Going Paperless

Getting rid of old-school documents have its pros and cons.
Pros: easier data keeping, information will be safe from any natural disasters that could physically destroy each file with no backup information.

Cons are, well, data breaches from an outside job.

According to Frost & Sullivan, 90% of clinical information system has adapted Electronic Health Records (EHR).
Great to hear – but the boom of electronic health records is still not properly supported by an effective medical IT security and support. Clinics are basically setting up their most confidential data for sharing with hackers.

In fact, the 2014 EMC and IDC research state that 90% of these healthcare data lacks better protection.
Going paperless with EHR might be great for keeping data safe from physical disasters and for easier and faster sharing.
The EHR protection, however, requires greater than just purchasing a safe vault.

  1. Valuable Data

It’s typical for patients to hand over personal and account details to clinics without any hesitation.

Obviously, this isn’t applicable nearly anywhere else –, especially to internet strangers.

A healthcare organisation is a goldmine for these critical data. One can only imagine hundreds to thousands of patient data stored in just one centralised system.

This information can be sold for a high price in the black market.

Healthcare Identities are reportedly used for a larger operational scam; causing a much longer and severe damage than a credit-card scam.

Stolen medical identities are hacker-favorite since they can be used to purchase medical equipment and drugs. It usually takes several weeks or even months for clinics, insurances, and patients involved to realize the crime. The main reason: medical accounts are not constantly checked and used daily as compared to a credit card scam.

Further supporting its true value, Reuters reported that stolen health credentials cost up to 20-times more than a typical credit card in the black market.

  1. Lack of Security

New York Times reported that healthcare organisations tend to be less secure than Financial organisations – even if both organisation’s data is equally important.

One of many reasons being, healthcare applications aren’t mainly designed to be secure; thus are easier to breach. Clinical applications and emergency room systems are made to record data and for easy sharing – and the least of their priority is to wall a cyber attack.

And while most healthcare clinics use outdated software, the clinic staffs are also found uninterested in learning new technology themselves. Sometimes, they even consider security guidelines to be an obstacle in providing immediate care instead of supporting their clinic security.

If a clinic’s technology continues to improve without any security support amongst unconcerned staffs, how else are they going to stand against a fully prepared cyberattack?

 

The Medical Industry has been through and is currently still going through, a challenging time in security alongside their technological advances. But this is something no more than an efficient Medical IT Support could fix.

Comlink Solutions have handled sensitive data for over 17 years; all from intricate and security heavy industries such as the medical field and the financial field. It continues to establish its superior service in the market by offering industry-specific Medical IT Support, among all others.

We understand that healthcare practitioners would rather focus their time and resources in helping their patients. With the same concern, Comlink Solutions would like to focus their own IT expertise in helping businesses regardless of their industry.

Comlink Solutions developed its Medical IT Support with a top-notch security system customised to protect all medical data. We promote a wide expanse of technology to improve your team’s collaborative medicine information, centralize patient records, and to provide a full range IT Support.

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