The healthcare industry boasts three times the number of data breaches as the financial industry so far this year. The most frequent causes include lost and stolen laptop computers, back-up tapes, hard drives and other portable media.
Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in New York provides an example. A FedEx package it sent to its billing processor carried CDs with unencrypted data. FedEx lost the shipment--and along with it the personal information of more than 130,000 of Lincoln's patients.
Lax data-handling procedures for storage and access within databases, along with data portability, are big parts of the problem. Another reason is past-prime gear: "Healthcare database technology is still older and a lot of it is proprietary," says a data security consultant in Dark Reading.
- see the Dark Reading article