Health IT, hacking, and cybersecurity: national trends in data breaches of protected health information

Objective: The rapid adoption of health information technology (IT) coupled with growing reports of ransomware, and hacking has made cybersecurity a priority in health care. This study leverages federal data in order to better understand current cybersecurity threats in the context of health IT.

Materials and Methods: Retrospective observational study of all available reported data breaches in the United States from 2013 to 2017, downloaded from a publicly available federal regulatory database.

Results: There were 1512 data breaches affecting 154 415 257 patient records from a heterogeneous distribution of covered entities (P < .001). There were 128 electronic medical record-related breaches of 4 867 920 patient records, while 363 hacking incidents affected 130 702 378 records.

Discussion and Conclusion: Despite making up less than 25% of all breaches, hacking was responsible for nearly 85% of all affected patient records. As medicine becomes increasingly interconnected and ...