We’ve talked before about healthcare data breaches and why timely document shredding is so essential for protecting patient data. Healthcare entities risk HIPAA violations and could expose patients’ private medical and/or financial information to outsiders with delayed data destruction. It’s easy to see how a data breach could affect patient privacy, considering healthcare records contain things like Social Security numbers and financial information. What might be less obvious is the very real link between data breaches and patient health.
There are several ways that a healthcare entity’s data destruction practices can trickle down to affect patient health. Even a mistake that seems minor, like using unlocked bins to collect patient records bound for document shredding, can lead to a data breach. And data breaches can potentially have life-or-death consequences for patients.
Here’s a quick look at three ways data breaches resulting from delayed data destruction impact patient health.
1. Data breaches could slash healthcare resources, affecting quality of care and patient health.
Healthcare data breaches are expensive. According to IBM’s most recent Cost of a Data Breach report, the average cost of a data breach is higher for healthcare entities than in any industry.
The healthcare industry has held the dubious title of “costliest data breaches” for 12 years running. The average cost of a healthcare data breach was $10.1 million in 2022. (That average represented an increase of 41.6% from 2020.) The expenses of a breach may include things like hiring investigators and crisis managers, sending notifications to all affected individuals, paying regulatory fines/legal bills, and the costs of lost business.
For healthcare entities that are already stretched thin, a $10M breach could be disastrous. Insurance may pay some of the costs (if the business has a policy covering data breaches), but any kind of breach event will inevitably cause some financial strain. Absorbing those costs may require a healthcare provider to lay off staff, cut hours/services, slash supply budgets and make other moves that negatively affect the quality of patient care.
2. Data breaches could cause distractions for healthcare staff.
A data breach is a big event that can send seismic shocks through a healthcare organization. When word spreads that a data breach has occurred, staff will probably start speculating about what happened, whose fault it was, and what it’s going to mean for the future of their jobs. There might be people around the office to audit the business’s security measures and upgrade different systems, which could interfere with everyone’s routine. Once patients are notified that their information was exposed in a breach, healthcare providers might find themselves fielding angry questions about data security instead of talking about what’s going on with the patient’s health.
Healthcare providers are working under enough pressure already. All the many distractions caused by a data breach will make it that much harder for providers to give high-quality patient healthcare.
3. Data breaches may make patients less likely to share sensitive health information.
Patient health suffers when patients withhold information from providers. They might be embarrassed or afraid to disclose certain symptoms or behaviors that their healthcare providers really need to know about if they have any doubt about the security of their records. That doubt makes data breaches a threat to the patient-provider relationship.
Researchers have studied the link between data privacy and patient trust. One survey asked people whether they had ever withheld information from a healthcare provider because of privacy and security concerns. The authors found a “significant association between trust in confidentiality and whether patients had ever withheld information from their doctor.”
While that survey isn’t conclusive (responses were collected in 2014 and the sample size was small), its findings seem reasonable. Say you are a patient considering whether to tell your doctor about something sensitive like substance abuse or physical abuse at home. If you know that the practice just had a data breach that exposed patient records, you’re going to hesitate and wonder whether you can truly trust that your private information is going to be secure. You might decide that you can’t and withhold a piece of information that would have changed your diagnosis or treatment plan.
Here’s the bottom line: healthcare data breaches have a domino effect that can hurt everyone touched by the organization.
In the aftermath of a breach, healthcare business leaders struggle with the legal, financial, and PR fallout. Healthcare providers struggle to maintain a high level of care with fewer resources. Ultimately, patient health can suffer.
Data security is critically important for all industries, but the stakes are especially high in healthcare. Patients could lose access to the medical care they need because of data breaches. Protecting patient health requires that healthcare entities maintain the strictest data security standards at all times and across all kinds of data.
While cybersecurity is naturally a huge concern for healthcare businesses trying to protect sensitive data, it’s critically important to protect paper records just as fiercely. Letting patient files and other obsolete records accumulate on-site increases the chance that they’ll be accessed by someone who shouldn’t be able to access them. Any unauthorized breach involving PHI can trigger HIPAA’s notification rule. Even if all that happens is that a visitor to the office goes through a cart of patient files that were left out in the open, your healthcare business will suffer some of the same fallout that you would after a ransomware attack. Patient trust will certainly be affected.
That’s why every component of your data destruction policy, including your rules around document shredding, plays a role in protecting patient health. Your shredding service should make regular pick-ups, so you’re not responsible for storing and protecting huge quantities of old patient records and other PHI. And all obsolete paper documents and other shreddable media (like hard drives and X-rays) should be kept in locked containers between pick-ups. If an internal breach of some kind were to happen in your healthcare office, these steps should help minimize the damage.
Northeast Data Destruction provides a full range of services for healthcare entities, including delivering locked containers, making same-day pick-ups, and providing certificates of destruction after sensitive materials have been shredded. We’ll take care of all your data destruction needs so you can focus all your energy on patient health. Contact us today to learn more.