(3 times more than any other industry)
Lost, stolen, encrypted, or breached records are expensive. But they’re even more expensive in healthcare.
This past year, healthcare offices (including rural hospitals) have shelled out on average $408 per patient record. That’s THREE times more than any other industry!
Breaches are costing healthcare organizations more and more over the last eight years (well above those in the financial industry, which cost about $206 per consumer).
Why are medical records costlier today? Cybersecurity experts have speculated all sorts of reasons (all plausible):
Feeding drug addictions—cybersecurity experts warn of an uptick in medical identity theft related to recent prescription drug addiction. Many people that have grown dependent on prescription painkillers have resorted to stealing identities to fulfill their habitual consumption.
Costly procedures—let’s face it, medicine is not always cheap. And most of the time when a complicated or serious treatment is needed, it often costs more than most are able to afford on their own. With little or no health insurance as a safety net, many folks resort to stolen identities to have life-saving procedures completed.
Medical records are simply worth more—Equifax and other large breaches have diluted the worth of social security numbers. Credit cards have a short shelf life (think 3 minutes!)
And the cost to remediate health data breaches is still on the rise!
While at one point last year, it looked like the cost of a data breach had fallen, the costs have once again risen across all sectors by $141 on average. What does this mean for you? In addition to having to maintain public and team-wide trust of your hospital’s data integrity, security and privacy, the cost of directly dealing with data breaches and cybersecurity remediations will cost you more.
Data breaches are more costly to organizations in the US than any other country. Here are a few statistics to getting you to think about why training your team and getting your network in order are both necessary to protect your patient records:
The average cost of a cyberattack resulting from a data glitch is about $131 to resolve.
These attacks often start as a bug in some piece of software that gives a cybercriminal carte blanche access to your network. Many computer and data glitches that lead to some recent cyberattacks have stemmed from unpatched networks left vulnerable. In essence, the networks that get attacked are some of the lowest hanging fruit from a security standpoint.
A cyberattack affecting any type of record (medical, staff or business record) will cost your hospital about $157 per record.
Human error typically costs your hospital $128 per record.
What’s more concerning than just the cost of record remediation?
The amount of time it takes for hospitals to recover from events.
On average, it takes 197 days to identify a data breach! And it takes on average another 69 days to contain and remediate it! That means that your records have been compromised for almost a year without any means of protecting patients and staff identities. And both of these numbers have increased from 2017 numbers, as severity of attacks have gotten worse.
The main cause of increased costs to healthcare?
The main cause of increased causes are not due to obvious network damage or data theft. Rather, main sources of costs for healthcare stem from lost reputation. Your organization should have a reputation of being a safe place—where private health information remains private. With a breach, trust in doctors and nurses maintaining confidentiality can get completely eroded.
An even bigger reason for high costs for healthcare breaches and attacks?
But even bigger than reputation is the loss of time. Loss of ability to treat patients (if your medical records and EHR system is shut down from a cyberattack, you’ll have incomplete records at best!). Loss in the ability to compensate employees. And as time goes by, the more time it takes to remediate an attack, the more costly the attack becomes.
Have you considered how costly cyberattacks are nowadays? Can you survive a ransomware attack? Contact us TODAY for a ransomware vulnerability assessment!
