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More insiders snooping into health records, says survey

Breaches into protected health information (PHI) are on the rise, and staffers are responsible for more than a third of the intrusions, a new survey has found.

The "2011 Survey of Patient Privacy Breaches" from Veriphyr, a Los Altos, Calif.-based provider of identity and access intelligence, determined that more than 70 percent of organizations surveyed were targets of one or more breaches of PHI within the last 12 months. And, insiders were responsible for the majority of breaches, with 35 percent taking an unauthorized look at medical data of fellow employees and 27 percent peeking at records of friends and relatives.

 

  The Veriphyr report determined, as evidenced by the fact that data breaches of patient information cost health care organizations nearly $6 billion annually, according to a Ponemon Institute report.

But what stood out of the survey for Norquist was the prevalence of insider abuse. Even the health care personnel themselves are concerned that fellow staffers will abuse the system and take a look at their personal health records out of curiosity, Norquist said.

But, he added, there is a second motive for insiders sneaking looks at health records: identity theft. With a growing market for personally identifiable information, health care personnel increasingly are being recruited to feed sensitive information to outsiders for Medicaid fraud and credit card schemes, he said

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