What do health data breaches reveal?

When hospital health records are hacked, the hospital must report how many patients might be harmed. But what, exactly, is revealed? A new study scouring 1,461 hospital data breaches over 10 years found that almost three-quarters of these security failures exposed information that could be exploited for identity or financial fraud. All told, those breaches affected 159 million patients. Of all the breaches, 2.4 million had sensitive medical information — defined as substance abuse, HIV, sexually transmitted diseases, mental health, and cancer — left unprotected. “Considering the fundamental tradeoff between data access and data security, it is critical to limit the risk for protected health information breaches,” the researchers write, spurred by moves to share these records more widely in health care.