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It’s a Bad Week for the Healthcare Industry

It’s a Bad Week for the Healthcare Industry

It definitely has been one of the worst weeks for data breaches in the healthcare industry. We went from big news from Worcester, MA with UMASS Memorial Medical Group (UMMG) reporting an insider data breach of about 14,000 patient health information, to probably the biggest not healthcare data breach but potentially the biggest breach of the year with up to 80 million patient personal records on the line. The recent breaches have sparked debate whether federal law should be changed so healthcare companies would be required to encrypt sensitive data they hold. The FBI last year also warned healthcare companies industry wide that their data security practices needed to be strengthened amid the growing threat of cyberattacks.

Although the Anthem Inc. breach was commended for detecting the breach only weeks after it apparently began, unlike the UMMG breach, it still says to patients who entrust their sensitive information to these organizations that these breaches will continue to occur. However, with big names like Anthem making the headlines, it is with great hope that these organizations are coming along and understanding the need to protect their data. Healthcare data holds a much longer shelf life than just a stolen credit card, which is

why that data is becoming increasingly popular to cyber criminals. That type of information can be used to open up credit accounts, perform identity theft, medical billing fraud, and insurance fraud.

Although security awareness and training is valuable and helpful, the time to make sure that data itself is secure is now. Making sure that the data is encrypted and permissions to those data are in control proves to mitigate the risk of exposure even after the data is stolen. Whether this is by outside hackers or insiders, data itself must be persistently secure.

Fasoo Enterprise DRM (Digital Rights Management) provides organization such as the two mentioned above and whole lot more in many different industries with the ability to protect, control and trace sensitive data containing intellectual property, patient health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII) and more. It maintains file protection and prevents unintended information disclosure no matter where the data is.

Having your data DRM protected with Fasoo, will mitigate the risk and ensure that you won’t make the news for the same reasons as UMMG or Anthem Inc. are. Doesn’t that sound like a plan?

Photo Credit: Perspecsys Photos

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