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The digital practice—the electronic storage, access, sharing, and monitoring of health information—promises increased convenience, improved patient care, and lower costs.¹ But this electronic access to medical records also brings with it a potentially costly risk to medical practices.

The digital practice—the electronic storage, access, sharing, and monitoring of health information—promises increased convenience, improved patient care, and lower costs.¹ But this electronic access to medical records also brings with it the risk of cyberattacks and new avenues for employee error and misuse that could put sensitive patient data at risk of exposure and your practice at risk of violating state and federal regulatory and privacy laws.

Physician burnout is associated with two-fold increased odds for unsafe care, unprofessional behaviors, and low patient satisfaction¹ and that electronic health records (EHR) are a leading factor in physician burnout².

“The Healthcare vertical is rife with Error and Misuse. In fact, it is the only industry vertical that has more internal actors behind breaches than external.”¹

Even with this grim realization, there is some good news for healthcare practices. Because more than half of healthcare data breaches are caused by inadvertent actions of employees, there is an opportunity for practices to greatly reduce their risk of attack with employee training and awareness that builds a pervasive “culture of security.”

“The Healthcare vertical is rife with Error and Misuse. In fact, it is the only industry vertical that has more internal actors behind breaches than external.”¹

While large and costly data breaches perpetrated by criminal hackers (such as the Equifax breach in 2017) make for splashy headlines, data breaches in healthcare caused by employee error and misuse are far more common.