Did you know that 2.7 million Americans were affected from around 32 major health information breach incidents recently? The bulk of the people were affected by the information breach that occurred with the Insurer Health Net and its business associate IBM. The Federal list released on June 22nd lists all the major healthcare information breaches [...]

As per the 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) released by Verizon there has been a considerable drop in the number of compromised records- from 361 million in 2008 to 144 million in 2009 and less than 4 million in 2010. Security breach incidents have reduced to 1% in the healthcare sector while the hospitality [...]

A recent federal list announced that there have been serious health information breaches that affected nearly 8.3 million people since September 2009. With 3 government agencies looking into Heath Net breaches including the case of 9 missing server drives from a California data center that was managed by IBM, the actual gravity of the situation [...]

The media is abuzz with news of data breaches especially with websites like the Health and Human Services (HHS) tracking them. As per the Office of Civil Rights, there were close to 9,109 data breaches by Sept 2010, averaging 25 data breaches per day! The HSS had earlier issued a given set of regulations to [...]

While Cignet is recovering from the shock of $4.3 million fine slapped on it for HIPAA violation, barely two days later, the General Hospital Corporation and Massachusetts General Physicians Organization Inc. or better known as the Mass General gets hit with a  fine of  $1 million penalty for blatant exposure of patients’ records in a [...]

A recent incident of HIPAA violation has reinforced the need for health care organizations to focus on creating and keeping the records efficiently for easy access; most do not create the records in the first place!  If they have not, the  tendency has been to subdue their responsibilities towards enforcement of security compliance measures with [...]

It is a strangely paradoxical situation that despite revised and stricter compliance regulations the number of security breaches seems to rise. The HIPAA mandate was enforced to tone down risks threatening patients’ personal records. But there has hardly been any positive report of effective progress towards a threat free environment.
As per a recent study conducted [...]