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Healthcare Breach List Hits 150 Mark

 |  By dnicastro@hcpro.com  
   September 07, 2010

The number of healthcare entities reporting breaches of unsecured PHI affecting 500 or more individuals has crossed the 150 mark, nearly one year after the first such breach was reported.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) breach notification website lists 153 entities as of Thursday, Sept. 2. The HIPAA privacy and security rule enforcer began publishing the breaches in February of this year, per the HITECH, but breaches date back to September 22, 2009.

The list is required in the breach notification interim final rule, which is in effect but under review by OCR before a final rule is submitted to the Office of Management Budget (OMB).

Hospitals and provider networks account for the highest number of breaches on the list, according to numbers recorded in August by Christopher Hourihan, manager of common security framework (CSF) development and operations at HITRUST, the Health Information Trust Alliance in Frisco, Texas.

Hourihan’s latest update reports that hospitals and provider networks account for 50 breaches, followed by physician practices at 35. Insurance plans experienced the third highest number of breaches with 26 or 18%.

However, when looking at the number of individuals affected by the breaches, insurance plans accounted for 58% or 2.8 million records.

 

Of the top 10 largest breaches reported on the OCR list based on the number of individuals affected, insurance plans were responsible for four.

Hospitals/provider networks were responsible for only 27% of the total records affected by breaches or 1.3 million records. Physician practices accounted for only 8% of the total number of records compromised by breaches.

That’s not such a surprise when you consider the large number of patient records that insurance plans deal with, says Hourihan. Physician practices may have patients’ PHI in the form of paper records or stored electronically on a computer. If a laptop computer is lost or stolen, it may contain only a few hundred patient records.

On the other hand, a breach by an insurance plan is likely to involve thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of records.

So, although physician practices are responsible for the second highest number of breaches, the relative damages for physician practices in terms of the number of records is fairly low, Hourihan says.

Insurers do not have many breaches, but when a breach occurs, it can be of a huge magnitude, he says.

For instance, the largest breach reported so far is by AvMed, Inc. of Florida and involved 1,222,000 patient records from the theft of a laptop computer in December, 2009. The second largest breach was reported by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, resulting from the theft of hard drives in October 2009; it affected 998,442 patients.

Correspondent Joanne Finnegan contributed to this report.

Dom Nicastro is a contributing writer. He edits the Medical Records Briefings newsletter and manages the HIPAA Update Blog.

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