Researchers at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management published a study that details the connection between hospitals that experienced a data breach and increases in the death rate among heart patients.
Researchers used the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) list of healthcare data breaches and studied patient mortality rates at more than 3,000 Medicare-certified hospitals. The horrifying results revealed that for those hospitals that experienced data breaches, up to 36 more deaths per 10,000 heart attacks occurred annually. The Vanderbilt study also found that even breach remediation efforts negatively affected patient outcomes due to a decline in the timeliness of care.
A Krebson Security post summarizes the study’s findings and highlights the need for additional research to truly understand the effects of cyber incidents in the healthcare sector and their ability to negatively impact patient outcomes.
With the holiday season quickly approaching, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) advises users to be aware of inevitable holiday scams and exposure to malicious cyber campaigns while shopping online or donating to charities. To evade victimization, users are encouraged to remain vigilant and take the following preventative measures:
- Use caution when opening email attachments and do not click on links in unsolicited email messages.
Refer to CISA’s Tips: Using Caution with Email Attachments, Avoiding Social Engineering and Phishing Scams. - Remain alert when shopping online. Refer to CISA’s Tip on Shopping Safely Online.
- Validate a charity’s authenticity before making donations. For more information, review the Federal Trade Commission’s page on Charity Scams.
Wishing everyone a safe and joyous holiday season.
Ron Benvenisti
PS: On Monday The Wall Street Journal reported that Google had secretly harvested “tens of millions” of medical records including patient names, lab results, diagnoses, hospitalization records and prescriptions from more than 2,600 hospitals as part of their secretive “Project Nightingale”. Sourced from internal Google documents, this would supposedly make suggestions about prescriptions, diagnoses and even who your doctors should be. Of course this completely bypasses government health regulations which require our permission to access private healthcare information or PHI. I wonder how that works – the big monopoly search corporations like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have hugely funded PACS and lucrative deals with the Feds in the swamp).
The Department of Health and Human Services is “probing” the legality of Nightingale which Google says is a way to “better render its services” and not an actual health-care provider.
So… sometimes my neighbor brings in my mail when I’m away, can he access my medical records now? How about my mechanic?
Can the Mafia/CIA kill a witness without a trace?
Can a IT tech provider be charged with murder when their clients get hacked?