After the report of HMSS analytics stating “78% of the medical institutes have been experiencing the ransomware attack in past 1 year”, there have been another report on the healthcare records security from AMA. This AMA survey report shows that there are 1300 physicians in all over the United States of America that have been affected due to the Cybercrime. The report further stated that there is not any new case about the cybercrime, but it is just the way when the crime occurs or how frequently the crime occurs.
The physicians who were the part of the survey states that they have been the victim of such crime and about 83% of physicians reported the same answer. Upon asking the nature of the cybercrime, 55% of the physicians stated that they experienced the Phishing attack. On the other hand, 48% of the physicians stated that they were the victim of Ransomware or the malware. All the physicians that are a middle or the higher level of practice experienced more exposure to the criminal activities as compared to those who are at initial or lower level of practice.
It is a fact that the victim faces the downtime, whenever there is any attack. According to 64% of the physicians, they faced a downtime of 4 hours after the attack while some of them (29%) said that they experienced 1 day downtime after having attack. Depending upon the frequency of the cyberattacks, 55% physicians were worried about the attacks in future. Most of them were concerned about the safety and security of data and medical information of their patients.
The physicians are already aware of the HIPAA rules and regulation and its importance for the cybersecurity but following the HIPAA requirements is not enough to save yourself from the criminal activity. 83% physicians stated that the institutes should go for some strict approach to save themselves from the criminal activities rather than using the HIPAA rules.
According to Kaveh Safavi, “the physicians should not only rely on the HIPAA rules and regulations to secure their profile. On the basis of the increasing cyberattacks, the physicians should go for the new technologies to make then secure and safe. This will also help them to gain trust of their patients.”
87% of the physicians believe that all their practice programs are according to the HIPAA rules, but there are some physicians that still think that there is some gap between the two.
