{"id":1690,"date":"2011-12-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/otava.test\/how-a-hipaa-breach-can-negatively-impact-your-business\/"},"modified":"2025-05-28T20:25:14","modified_gmt":"2025-05-28T20:25:14","slug":"how-a-hipaa-breach-can-negatively-impact-your-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.otava.com\/blog\/how-a-hipaa-breach-can-negatively-impact-your-business\/","title":{"rendered":"How a HIPAA Breach Can Negatively Impact Your Business"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

According to the Ponemon Institute\u2019s 2011 Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy and Data Security, data security breaches cost the U.S. healthcare industry an estimated $6.5 billion a year, up 10 percent from last year. About 29 percent of the providers reported that one consequence of data breaches was medical identity theft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The major causes of healthcare data breaches include lost or stolen devices (nearly 50 percent), third party\/business associate mistakes (46 percent) and unintentional employee actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The prevalence of business associates as the source of a data breach highlights the importance of vetting your vendors thoroughly for HIPAA compliant hosting<\/a> \u2013 although passing a HIPAA audit of their own does not make your organization completely compliant, it does mean your data hosting solution and provider has the proper technology, policies and procedures in place to protect your company from a data breach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The use of mobile devices in the healthcare industry is another contributor to data loss \u2013 while 80 percent are using them to gather, transmit and store patient information, half of them are not securing them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How can your organization secure sensitive protected health information (PHI) during transfer, storage and transmittal? Online Tech recommends data encryption, virtual or dedicated firewalls, offsite backup<\/a> and antivirus to meet HIPAA\/HITECH standards and keep data safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study also reports that fifty-five percent of respondents agreed that concerns about the ongoing HIPAA audits enforced by OCR and the onsite investigations have affected changes in their patient data privacy and security policies and procedures.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Negative Impacts of Data Breach<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

What are the consequences of a data breach that healthcare organizations must suffer?<\/p>\n\n\n\n