Report: Number of Healthcare Records Breached Hit Four-Year Low in 2017

In 2017, the number of individuals affected by breaches within the healthcare sector reached a four-year low, according to a new report from Campbell, Calif.-based security company Bitglass.

The report revealed that the majority of breaches were due to hacking and IT incidents (71 percent), and that percentage has continued to grow since 2014. The fourth annual Healthcare Breach Report aggregates data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Wall of Shame—a database of breach disclosures that is required as part of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)—to identify the most common causes of data leakage.

Bitglass explored the changes in breach frequency as well as the preventive steps organizations have taken to limit the impact of each breach from 2014 to 2017. Among the key report findings:

• The number of hacking and IT Incidents has increased, but organizations have done a better job mitigating damage, with 16,060 records compromised per breach on average in 2017.
• The number of breached healthcare records decreased by 72 percent between 2015 and 2017 and by 95 percent since 2016 (excluding mega-breaches at Anthem and Premera).
• The number of data breaches in 2017 dropped slightly to 294, down from 328 in 2016, indicating that healthcare remains a target for hackers, though many are shifting focus to other high-value targets.
• From 2014 to 2017, healthcare organizations reduced the number of breach incidents attributed to lost and stolen devices by 63 percent.

A similar report in January from cybersecurity software company Protenus found that while there was a slight increase in the number of breaches (450 in 2016 compared to 477 in 2017), there was also a drastic decrease in the number of affected patient records—27.3 million records breached in 2016, over five times greater than the number of records affected in 2017.

"Mega-breaches like Anthem and Premera Blue Cross, along with device loss and theft, caused healthcare breaches to spike in 2015 and 2016," Mike Schuricht, vice president of product management at Bitglass, said in a statement. "Since then, organizations in the health sector have made great strides in mitigating threats to protected health information (PHI),  thus greatly reducing the total number of individuals affected by healthcare data breaches in 2017."