Trends, characteristics of health data breaches

Editor's Note

Despite ethical and legal obligations to protect patient privacy and efforts to establish best practices for healthcare information security, breach rates have increased since 2010, this study finds.

Of 2,149 breaches that involved 176.4 million records, the most common entities breached were healthcare providers, with 1,503 breaches that included 37.1 million records.

Health plans accounted for the largest share of total records breached, with 278 breaches, comprising a total of 110.4 million records.

The most commonly breached locations shifted from laptop and paper or films in 2010 to network server and email in 2017.

Though networked digital health records have the potential to improve clinical care and facilitate learning, they also have the potential for harm to vast numbers of patients if data security is not improved, the authors say.