We can’t escape it in our current-day, online, Web-connected culture: Every day it seems there is another news story about a business organization that’s been hit with yet another data breach, and which has cost that organization sometimes many hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you’re a healthcare facility or organization, then it could be HIPAA fines on top of what the data breach or ransomware attack costs you. The recent data breach at Athens Orthopedic, has affected nearly 200,000 patients. The CEO of the organization that underwent the breach has made a statement to their clients, however, that they cannot pay what would amount to “millions of dollars [to] pay for credit monitoring for nearly 200,000 patients and keep Athens Orthopedic as a viable business”. The reason credit monitoring plays into this situation is that financial information was hacked during the June 14 attack, and it became incumbent upon the clinic to monitor and correct the credit reports of patients whose banking and financial info might be exploited by way of a report to the three major credit reporting bureaus that the individuals’ financial info was stolen. It’s unknown at this time whether, under PCI compliance laws the health care organization could be given Payment Card Industry fines as well.
Implications of Healthcare Data Breach
Anyone who truly understands IT security and data networking knows that that is somewhat of a naïve statement to have made, and also sadly indicative of the fact that Athens Orthopedic could have – nay, should have had proper managed IT services in place, and obviously didn’t. It would have saved yet another healthcare facility yet more embarrassment, bad public relations, lost revenue, and potentially huge HIPAA fines. All of that on top of having to fix the problem then finally resorting to getting IT support that includes monthly IT infrastructure maintenance that would have prevented the disaster in the first place!
Get Reliable IT Monitoring
Doesn’t it make better sense to have reliable IT services in place before disaster strikes? Any IT professional will advise you of this – that in today’s day and age of ransomware, malware, spyware, email phishing scams, and hackers cyberattacking vulnerable data networks opportunistically you have to make sure those hackers have no chance to infiltrate your data center, right from the get-go. Especially if you’re a business charged with the responsibility of keeping Protected Health Information (PHI) safe and secure with the threat of HIPAA fines staring you down if you don’t!
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