HIPAA

The healthcare industry still lags behind in data security, the Frisco, Texas-based collaborative, the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) has deduced after an analysis of the industry’s response to data breaches from 2009 to the present. The report, “A Look Back: U.S. Healthcare Data Breach Trends,” analyzes every breach that has affected 500 or more individuals, and while there has been a decline in the number of breaches, the report says the industry’s susceptibility to various infiltrations has stagnated.

With the rapid adoption of audiovisual technology into healthcare, healthcare CIOs and other healthcare IT leaders face the difficult decision of how to balance their organizations’ investment dollars against budgetary constraints, security, and selection of technology that is appropriate to the provider organization’s IT infrastructure. At a roundtable discussion, “Balancing Innovation, Budget Constraints, and Network Security,” part of the Technology Crossroads Conference that was put on by the National eHealth Collaborative in Washington, D.C., last week, expert panelists discussed wide-raging topics confronting provider organizations against the backdrop of the fast-changing technology landscape, including technology investments, cost pressures, health information exchange, network security, cloud computing, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), a large academic medical center, recently announced a data breach that affected approximately 1,500 patients. UAMS says a former physician, who was fired in 2010, kept patient lists and notes after leaving the hospital in June of that year.

A recent report, brought to my attention by the nice folks at The Advisory Board Company, looked at how more doctors in the U.K. are using the Medical Defence Union (MDU) because they are being stalked on social media by an infatuated patient. Reading this report and having covered social media in healthcare extensively, I can understand why some doctors are reluctant to connect with their patients on social media, even when it has nothing to do with love.

Consumers along with physicians and nurses now use devices for both personal and professional purposes. Clinicians are bringing their own mobile devices (BYODs) in droves to work to communicate with each other about patients, exchange data and access medical apps. With such fast-paced changes in the mobile medical world, the BYOD movement has raised serious privacy, security and liability risks for providers.