With Medicare expected to cover a projected 80 million people by 2030, entrepreneurs and investors are cashing in on what analysts see as an inevitable shift in health care away from the hospital and into the homes of aging patients.
A ransomware group called Hive is claiming to have stolen private data for 850,000 members of Partnership HealthPlan of California, a nonprofit that manages health care for Medi-Cal patients in 14 counties.
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.