While the government has passed laws to better protect private health information, most data health-care providers say that information isn’t any safer than it was before, according to a survey by the Ponemon Institute.
A nearly equal number, 70 per cent, say that protecting patient data is not a top priority despite passage of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in 1996 and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009, both of which were designed to better guard personal health information.
And about the same number (71 per cent) say their health-care organizations lack resources, have insufficient policies (69 per cent) and too few appropriately trained staffers (52 per cent) to carry out privacy mandates, the Ponemon study says.
“Federal regulations have not improved the safety of patient records,” the survey concludes. Most respondents (56 per cent) say they need help to even figure out if they are in compliance.
Among the respondents, the most common means by which data breaches were discovered were by an employee, via an audit or because a patient complained, the survey says.
Most of the breaches were caused by unintentional actions such as inadvertently e-mailing data, lost or stolen devices contained the data and glitches by third parties that jeopardized data, the Ponemon survey says.
The study also finds: