Cybersecurity and Healthcare

With the numerous data breaches in health care over the last several years, it almost appears that a patient having any expectation of privacy and security of their information is unreasonable. In 2015 alone, tens of millions of personal healthcare records have been hacked into by adversarial nation states and organized crime. Almost daily the headlines document a new cyberattack that is sophisticated and directly targeted at healthcare. Add to these more traditional cybersecurity incidents, the numerous workforce (user) mistakes like losing laptops, backup tapes, and sending unencrypted e-mails and one can legitimately question any realistic expectation of privacy and security in today’s and tomorrow’ digitized healthcare world. Yet, the expectation is based on legal and ethical obligations for health providers to do exactly that—protect the privacy of the information through reasonable and appropriate cybersecurity.