The data security breach at Equifax is a cautionary note to hospitals and payers to watch out for vendor vulnerabilities. Equifax is the financial verification vendor for the exchange marketplaces.
The announcement of the breach comes just over a month after Anthem reached the largest ever settlement in a data-breach case.
Unlike recent ranswomare attacks, the breach came from within the company.
Anthem has reached a $115 million deal to settle lawsuits over a 2015 data breach in which hackers stole personal information from 78.8 million employees and current and former members.
UNC Health Care has sent out a letter alerting its prenatal patients that their confidential medical information may have been shared with their home county by mistake.
Hackers held the Atlanta health system's patient appointments system for ransom, compromising tens of thousands of patients' sensitive personal information.
The frequency and scope of data breaches--from cyberattacks to simple theft and loss--has grown along with the exploding volume of digitized information in healthcare delivery and financial transactions.
In 2016, there were 106 major healthcare data breaches attributed to hackers. Those breaches exposed 13.5 million individuals' records. The average cost to a healthcare organization for loss of a single record was $402. Doing the math, that's $2.8 billion spent on those hacking incidents alone.
Cyber-insecurity mounted in 2016 as a series of high-profile attacks signaled the dark side of the federal government's huge push to provide every American with an electronic health record.
Health IT systems are becoming more like Christmas trees powered by the internet of things and a drive to connect patients to their medical data through mobile devices, apps and portals.
The encryption-enabled data exchange system holds great promise in simplifying an array of healthcare data transactions on both the business and clinical sides of healthcare—from claims adjudication to precision medicine.
The websites of EHR software providers Athenahealth and Allscripts were down for some parts of the country Friday during the same time hackers launched an attack against the servers of Dyn, a major Domain Name System host.
