Healthcare breaches by the number [infographic]

When it comes to data breaches, there are just some industries that are more prone to attacks then others. Lately, the healthcare industry has been hit hard—take a look at the numbers:

• There was an average of one health data breach per day in 2016, according to the Protenus Breach Barometer
• Insiders caused 43 percent of the data breach incidents. Insiders — including employees stealing patient information or snooping in patient files — were the cause of 192 incidents. Ninety-nine incidents were due to insider error or accident, and 91 were due to insider wrongdoing.
• There were 450 total breach incidents in 2016. The analysis is based on 450 incidents either reported to HHS or disclosed to the media throughout the year.
• More than 27 million patient records were breached in 2016. The breaches resulted in 27,314,647 affected patient records.
• Hacking and ransomware were responsible for 26.8 percent of the breaches.Hacking and ransomware caused 120 breach incidents in 2016.
• It took the average entity 607 days to discover breaches caused by insider wrongdoing.On a wider scale, it took the average entity 233 days to discover it had experience a breach.
• Breach incidents affected 47 states.However, Protenus and DataBreaches.com only had location information available for 443 of the total incidents. California reported the most breaches — 73 — while Idaho, North Dakota and Vermont did not disclose any breaches.

Why healthcare data and security continues to be an important topic in 2017

2017 is predicted to be another tough year on the health care industry, in terms of data security and breaches. The latest Black Book poll of healthcare PR clients showed that physician satisfaction and medico-legal problems are no longer the key concerns, and that 2017 will see a higher focus on technological and financial issues. This includes data breaches, system failures, hacking, ransomware, and a disrupted flow of financial records. These system issues and data security breaches often significantly and negatively affect an organization’s reputation.

Learn more about how cyber attacks are affecting the healthcare industry here.