Health data going digital has its inevitable pluses and minuses, despite HIPAA compliance. The clear minuses involve increasing data breaches, especially within the last year.
As Forbes‘ Dan Munro pointed out, nearly 96 million records were recently stolen from Community Health Systems (4.5 million), Anthem (80 million) and Premera (11 million).
While the value of EHRs and the “cloud” are pretty clear, the idea of such mass amounts of information being potentially accessible clearly has its downsides.
With the Rise of AI, What IP Disputes in Healthcare Are Likely to Emerge?
Munck Wilson Mandala Partner Greg Howison shared his perspective on some of the legal ramifications around AI, IP, connected devices and the data they generate, in response to emailed questions.
Munro highlighted four things to keep in mind when it comes to this subject:
- Privacy may well be dead, but trust isn’t and trust is finite.
- Medical data is lifelong and has serious clinical consequences along with financial ones.
- Motivated attackers have a big advantage over all defenders of every size. Attackers only need to exploit one vulnerability once whereas defenders need to protect against all attacks all the time.
- The latest techniques for cyber theft at scale are much less about breaching networks from the outside and all about social engineering with sophisticated tools to capture privileged access from the inside.
Beyond his personal thoughts on the matter, Munro cited Skyhigh Networks‘ data focused on cloud adoption and where it has a prominent affect, specifically in healthcare. Here are some of the charts that demonstrate the gravity of the subject:
There are some risks with the cloud system that we can’t necessarily avoid, but a more sophisticated level of consciousness and preparation is definitely required for solid security.
A Personalized Approach to Medication Nonadherence
At the Abarca Forward conference earlier this year, George Van Antwerp, managing director at Deloitte, discussed how social determinants of health and a personalized member experience can improve medication adherence and health outcomes.
As Rajiv Gupta, CEO at Skyhigh Networks, told Forbes:
The report shows that employees everywhere, even in the most locked-down organizations, are the same — they all use cloud services in order to get their job done most efficiently — and don’t often take permission from their IT departments when using cloud services. Organizations have the choice to ignore this need, to make a futile attempt to block the use of all cloud services, or to recognize this need, understand the risks of specific cloud services, and coach their employees to use enterprise-ready cloud services. Whatever approach organizations take, this report also shows that organizations are subject to more insider threat and compromised account incidents than they are aware, and that they therefore need to track the use of all cloud services (sometimes referred to as “to shine a light on Shadow IT”) in order to detect and prevent company confidential data from inappropriately leaving the organization over a cloud service.
Photo: Flickr user Thangaraj Kumaravel
