Cyberattacks are now a daily threat for healthcare organizations, and healthcare data breach costs have increased to an average of $9.23 million per incident, according to IBM Security’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021. So it’s no wonder that everyone from the cybersecurity team to administrative assistants to nurses and physicians are aware of the impact of cybercrime on a healthcare organization.
Since the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed and signed in 1996, a National Provider Identifier and many of the law’s transactions and code set standards have been successfully implemented, and now have been in use for years. However, efforts to implement another type of identifier found in the act, a National Patient Identifier, have continued to be frustrated by Congress blocking any funding from being put towards it.
As health care has shifted to increasingly rely on digital tools for patient care, digital inclusion has become critical to promoting health care equity.