Our phones and computers give us such easy access to so many things—we can communicate with anyone, shop until we drop, get tickets to a big game, pay bills, navigate our way on untraveled roads and yes, check our medical records, test results and request the next doctor’s appointment. For us, and the companies we rely on, it’s often a matter of keystrokes.
It’s so convenient, so satisfying, so simple. But with increasingly frequency, we’re reminded of what we potentially give up in return—privacy and security.
The Change Healthcare outage that has dominated the headlines for the past few weeks shows just how exposed healthcare is. Consumers had probably never heard of Change, part of UnitedHealth Group, until a cyberattack paralyzed transactions and claims processing systems, affecting providers, payers, pharmacists and patients. A sign of how serious this one has been: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services intervened to help. Meanwhile, lawsuits alleging patients’ personal information has been compromised have been filed.
It’s part of an inauspicious first quarter when it comes to data breaches and follows a year in which a record 133 million people were potentially affected by other incidents. Do a little math and that amounts to almost
4 in 10 people in the United States. That’s a frightening level of vulnerability.
“Everybody talks about the benefits of technology and integration of technology, but you’ve also got to be aware of the dangers inherent in that,” Michael Dowling, president and CEO of Northwell Health, told Modern Healthcare last week in a story about how providers were handling the disruption.
The Change Healthcare incident, along with all the hacks that have come before it and will succeed it, lead to questions about the power big players wield, what happens when that market dominance is threatened by bad actors and what systems are in place as a fallback. These incidents also should lead to conversations about training an increasingly
tech-savvy workforce on how to get work done the old-fashioned way when systems break down.
I think most of us embrace technology that can make our lives easier. But we need to trust it, and the companies that provide it, too.
