Introduction
Hacking the Healthcare System
Healthcare has the highest cyber-attacks in the industry. This is only growing. Nearly half of all health care organizations have reported criminal attacks that caused a breach in their systems (Goodman, 2015). These hackers are gaining access to the electronic health information. Identification, banking information, and pharmacies used are just some of the data that these online hackers are getting their hands on. This is costing over six billion dollars to the healthcare organizations (Goodman, 2015). How can anyone feel safe with this transition from paper charting to all online, knowing that whatever information they gave the nurse, front desk worker, and even their physician, that someone can …show more content…
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Task Force, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) are just a few government organizations trying to tackle this problem. A challenge that they face is that not a lot of firewalls and safeguards for hackers to have to work around to break into these systems. With technology always advancing, one would think that this would be a main area of focus to aid in preventing these cyber-attacks, is building more advanced firewalls that are almost impossible to get around.
The purpose of this study is to examine the measures that the government is taking on the issue of healthcare cyber-attacks, risks the consumer needs to be aware of, and the problems with the data protection. …show more content…
There are various reasons why systems in the healthcare industry specifically are under cyber-attack. The passwords to get around the security firewalls are not strong or enforced enough to where one can easily figure out or hack in. Employee education or lack thereof is another issue healthcare is faced with. Health information about a patient is a need to know basis and some healthcare workers have easy access to information that should not be readily available to them. Losing paper information about a patient, or stolen information about a patient is another issue with data protection. More measures need to be taken to prevent these actions (Douglas & Innocenti,
Hacking the Healthcare System
Healthcare has the highest cyber-attacks in the industry. This is only growing. Nearly half of all health care organizations have reported criminal attacks that caused a breach in their systems (Goodman, 2015). These hackers are gaining access to the electronic health information. Identification, banking information, and pharmacies used are just some of the data that these online hackers are getting their hands on. This is costing over six billion dollars to the healthcare organizations (Goodman, 2015). How can anyone feel safe with this transition from paper charting to all online, knowing that whatever information they gave the nurse, front desk worker, and even their physician, that someone can …show more content…
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Task Force, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) are just a few government organizations trying to tackle this problem. A challenge that they face is that not a lot of firewalls and safeguards for hackers to have to work around to break into these systems. With technology always advancing, one would think that this would be a main area of focus to aid in preventing these cyber-attacks, is building more advanced firewalls that are almost impossible to get around.
The purpose of this study is to examine the measures that the government is taking on the issue of healthcare cyber-attacks, risks the consumer needs to be aware of, and the problems with the data protection. …show more content…
There are various reasons why systems in the healthcare industry specifically are under cyber-attack. The passwords to get around the security firewalls are not strong or enforced enough to where one can easily figure out or hack in. Employee education or lack thereof is another issue healthcare is faced with. Health information about a patient is a need to know basis and some healthcare workers have easy access to information that should not be readily available to them. Losing paper information about a patient, or stolen information about a patient is another issue with data protection. More measures need to be taken to prevent these actions (Douglas & Innocenti,