The most important healthcare information security trend for the year ahead is the rush to implement electronic health records while taking advantage of all their security features, says Dixie Baker, a well-known security expert who's advising federal regulators on policy issues.
The federal list of major health information breaches has served as an eye-opener, making many healthcare organizations much more aware of their security risks.
Geisinger Health System has notified about 3,000 patients about a breach incident in which a physician inappropriately e-mailed unencrypted health information from his work computer to his home computer.
Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee Labs threat research vice president, discusses the company's annual threat predictions, saying: "We are seeing an escalating threat landscape in 2011."
A national model for state laws on patient privacy issues would play a key role in the success of health information exchanges, says Richard Gibson, M.D., who recently testified before Congress.
"The environment that started by supporting whistleblowers ... is essentially morphing into 'Gee, we as an organization need to be completely transparent, whether we want to or not,'" says Cal Slemp, managing director of Protiviti.
"Managing risk with regard to information systems and security sometimes doesn't go to the highest levels and that's why the risk framework is a way to get senior leaders involved early in the process," NIST senior computer scientist Ron Ross says.
Many physician group practices adopting their first electronic health records systems will have a lot of work to do when it comes to information security, a new survey confirms.
The innocent use for three years of a Yahoo calendar application exposed personally identifiable information of 878 patients at the Department of Veterans Affairs' Chicago Healthcare Systems, a violation of VA policy.
Thwarting the insider threat entails more than knowing an individual with access to a computer, but to recognize the synergy between the individual, organization, technology and environment, I3P Research Director Shari Lawrence Pfleeger says.
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