A recent article in American Medical News notes that the greatest risks to healthcare providers in the area of maintaining patient privacy isn’t offshore hackers or rogue employees, but rather simple accidents.

Over six months in 2009, 12,500 mobile devices were left in taxis. And 4,500 USB “thumb” drives were left in pants pockets that were then set to the cleaners. And the vast majority of these devices did not use data encryption.

What makes this so damaging to the organizations that employ these individuals, is that one-third of healthcare professionals maintain patient data on their mobile devices – smartphones, laptops and removable media such as memory sticks.

Now that the data breach provisions of the HITECH Act our open to enforcement, such incidents may cost the healthcare provider up to $1.5 million. Quite a sum for a simple momentary lapse or accident.

This article, and the related study, highlights the importance for healthcare providers to evaluate the risk factors for non-malicious identity data loss. These types of risks are often overlooked, or at least prioritized at a lower level, by security professionals because of the tendency to focus on technology solutions for data security. Or in lieu of technology, to rely on policies.

While I suspect most healthcare providers have policies to inhibit professionals to storing patient data on their laptops, moving it from one location to another with a thumb drive, or viewing it on a smartphone, as a practical matter, these do not appear to stand in the way of progress. And progress of this sort creates risks that organizations must acknowledge as a first step towards understanding how to manage them.

There appears to be some level of controversy that has been stirred up in a less followed area of the healthcare debate than single payer, that associated with the privacy of health information. The Department of Health and Human Services just released its rules for healthcare organizations to follow the data breach notification provisions of the HITECH Act.

In the rules, they have established a “harm threshold” which is self-assessed by the healthcare organization, and directed that in the case of a data breach incident, that notification of the individuals, the public and their agency ONLY needs to occur if they have determined that their is significant risk of  financial, reputational or other harm to those affected by the data loss.

This past week, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce voiced concern over the addition of this provision. They indicated that it was not the intent of the legislation to provide for notification in the case of a data breach incident only in cases where harm can be proved, but rather for all data breach incidents. Presumably to act as a deterrent to organizations with lax practices, as well as to ensure that individuals can practice due care, even in cases where there may be little chance of real harm.

Network World reported in their article titled “House members seek stronger health care data breach notifications, ‘Harm threshold’ runs counter to Congress’ intent” that:

“In a letter dated Oct. 1, members of the House committee asked HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to revise or repeal the new provision at the ’soonest appropriate opportunity’. The letter, signed by the chairman of the committee, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and others, noted that the new harm threshold provision runs counter to Congress’ intent in passing the breach notification bill. The bill’s statutory language does not imply a harm standard, Waxman wrote. In fact, in drafting the bill, Congress had explicitly rejected the idea of including such a provision because of the ‘breadth of discretion’ it would have given a breached entity, the letter said.”

It is terrific to see Congress trying to do the right thing, when it comes to the privacy of protected health information (PHI). I’m hopeful that HHS will see the wisdom in revising their rules for the benefit of all of us that rely on the American healthcare system.

In recent months, with the continued growth in highly public data breach incidents, we began looking at how organizations assess their level of exposure to data breach risk. I suspect if you ask the CEO of most public companies or public sector organizations about their level of risk, that they would tell you that they are “highly secure” and maintain excellent practices to prevent the misappropriation of personal information of their customers, patients, employees, students and other affiliates.

For many firms, they have to meet security and compliance requirements that are necessities in their industry, such as PCI for those that handle credit card information and HIPAA for healthcare organizations. Historically I think that they felt such rigorous compliance requirements could ensure their safety from the risks of data breach.

However, the recent past demonstrates that no organization is really immune to a potential data breach incident. The very visible Heartland Payment Systems breach affected many millions of Americans who’s credit cards were processed by Heartland, an organization that had to adhere to very strict security standards set for the financial industry and their payment processors.  This seeming inconsistency between a perception of being immune from data breach risks with the rapid growth in data breach incidents, led us to think about whether organizations can “quantify” their level of data breach risk.

We were somewhat surprised that there isn’t much available to organizations to help them in measuring and scoring their level of data breach risk. Given this situation, we began to look at how we could model and quantify risks specific to the breach of personally identifiable information (PII) and personal health information (PHI), since it is the unauthorized release of this information that is regulated by state and now federal laws.

To this end, we created what we call the Breach Healthcheck(tm),  tool that uses a proprietary model to assists organizations in quantifying two dimensions of measurement into a Breach Protection Index(tm) — measuring both an organizations level of data breach exposure as well as their level of data breach protection.  Breach Healthcheck then maps this index onto a two dimensional risk map that allows organizations to get a visual indicator as to their level of data breach risk.

Our sense is that organizations that are trusted to hold PII and PHI will find it useful to be able to measure their level of data breach risk, and to understand the primary areas where their practices may lead to unanticipated levels of risk. To get complimentary access to the Breach Healthcheck tool, qualified organizations can contact ID Experts at www.idexpertscorp.com or 866-726-4271.