From: FierceCIO
Boards and the C-suite need to make data protection a priority.
By Caron Carlson
Data breaches have become commonplace in healthcare. A full 94 percent of healthcare organizations recently surveyed by the Ponemon Institute experienced a breach in the last two years, and 45 percent had more than five breaches in that time period. The problem is costing the industry nearly $7 billion a year and it is only getting worse. The answer is to put the board of directors in charge of data security, write Larry Ponemon and Rick Kam in a post at Forbes.
The adoption of electronic health records technology, mandated by the federal government, is putting individuals’ privacy at risk. New guidance and best practices surrounding security standards are needed. Meanwhile, cloud computing and mobile technologies are exacerbating the risks.
Too often, data privacy and security are not a priority in the C-suite. Nearly three-fourths of the organizations surveyed by Ponemon do not have sufficient resources for breach prevention and detection. To make the top executives understand the reality of threats to data privacy, information security at healthcare organizations should report directly to the board, Ponemon and Kam write.
For more: – see Larry Ponemon and Rick Kam’s post at Forbes
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