Healthcare's slack security costs $1.6B

If you're shirking your security systems' obligations all to save a few pennies, better think again. Chances are, it will end up costing much more down the road -- a whopping $1.6 billion more. Most healthcare organizations nationwide, some 61 percent to be exact, reported a security related incident in the form of security breach, data loss or unplanned downtime at least once this past year, according to a new health IT report by MeriTalk, a public-private organization working to improve government information technology. These security events cost U.S. hospitals an estimated $1.6 billion each year. Breaking it down by incident, hospitals should expect to hand over on average $810,000 per security breach, which occurs at nearly one in five healthcare organizations nationwide.