Should we all just post our most personal health data on our Facebook pages? Seems like keeping it confidential gets more difficult for the health care industry every day.
Kaiser Permanente, along with Stanford University researchers, reviewed data on breaches affecting the information of at least 500 individuals from 2010 to 2013. The upshot: breaches increased from 214 in 2010 to 265 in 2013. The number of records involved grew from 5.1 million to 9 million.
But simply looking at the contrast between 2010 and 2013 does not tell the whole story.
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For instance, a sharp increase occurred from 2010 to 2011, when the number of major breaches jumped to 236 from 214 and the number of records compromised rose from 5.1 million to 11.6 million. In addition, the number of breaches involving at least one million records went from one to three.
Then, in 2012, breaches feel, from 236 to 234. The number of record shriveled to 3.4 million. There were no breaches involving at least one million records. Then came the big jump in 2013 to 265 breaches. In total during that period, there were 949 major breaches.
Hacking was a major contributor to the general trend toward more breaches, the report said, but straight-out theft was also a huge factor. The difference was that hacking increased greatly, from 12 percent in 2010 to 27 percent in 2013.
"While hacking has garnered a lot of recent attention, a more common reason for breaches is simple theft of unsecured paper or electronic records," said study lead author Vincent Liu of Kaiser Permanente's Division of Research. However, hackers can access, and tend to target, much larger data bases than do thieves, he said.
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
