Data breaches in healthcare saw a staggering jump of 55.1% in 2020 as the count increased to 599 in 2020 from 386 reported a year ago. The latest report from cloud security company Bitglass stated that these breaches affected more than 26 million people. It also said that the average cost of a breach in healthcare remained higher than that of every other industry in 2020, and increased 10.5% since 2019. The cost per breached record also increased 16.3% from $429 in 2019 to $499 this year.
- According to the report, this year, hacking and IT incidents led to 67.3% of all healthcare breaches–more than three times that of the next highest category. Additionally, breaches caused by hacking and IT incidents exposed 91.2% of all breached records in healthcare in 2020 — 24.1 million out of 26.4 million. Bitglass said these results demonstrate the heightened impact of cybersecurity breaches, the shifting strategies of malicious actors, as well as how healthcare organizations are grappling with cybersecurity in today’s dynamic, cloud-first world.
- In 2014, lost and stolen devices were the leading causes of security breaches in healthcare, while hacking and IT incidents were the least common causes. Today, things have inverted. “Hacking and IT incidents are now the primary forces behind healthcare breaches — as they have been each year since 2017. As organizations continue to embrace cloud migration and digital transformation, healthcare organizations must leverage the proper tools and strategies to successfully protect patient records and respond to the growing volume of threats to their IT ecosystems,” the report states.
- Each year since 2015, hacking and IT incidents have been exposing more records than any other breach type. Additionally, the scales of these incidents have been increasing each year since 2018, suggesting that organizations are increasingly leaning on their IT resources, and criminals have been increasingly targeting them, it said.
- Among states, according to the report, there were 49 healthcare breaches in 2020 in California, which was more than that of any other state and surpassed last year’s leader, Texas, which suffered 43 breaches this year. Michigan had the highest count of individuals affected, but this was primarily due to the Trinity Health breach, which impacted 3.3 million victims on its own.