Data security is a dynamic discipline that isn’t restricted to a single industry. Instead, data security is an invaluable framework consisting of policies, practices, processes, and tools that are critical to ensuring the utmost protection of data against evolving threats.
One such industry where data security is of paramount importance is healthcare, where healthcare organizations are guardians of the most sensitive data. This includes patient health records, clinical data from imaging and lab tests, financial and administrative data from billing and scheduling, data from health and fitness devices, population health studies, and even genomic data for personalized medicine.
This comprehensive set of information and confidential dataset is why the healthcare industry’s repository of data and private medical information has long been a magnet for cybercriminals. The average cost of a healthcare data breach reached $9.77 million in 2024, the highest across all industries. This number was $10.93 million in 2023.
Patients demand confidentiality and several rights over their health data. To address those concerns, regulators impose stringent healthcare data security requirements as well as other obligations on healthcare organizations. Ensuring that requires a robust healthcare data security strategy that ensures healthcare data remains secured in transit and at rest.
What is Healthcare Data Security?
Healthcare data security refers to the policies, practices, and technologies healthcare providers and companies use to protect electronic health records (EHRs), personal health information (PHI), and other sensitive patient data from unauthorized access, corruption, or theft.
It’s a comprehensive practice of ensuring that data belonging to patients aligns with the organization’s data security practices, industry’s ethical best practices concerning patient data, regulatory requirements, etc.
Typical healthcare data security involves the implementation of robust security measures. Although many, most notable ones include encryption, particularly AES-256, authentication controls such as role-based access control (RBAC) and multi-factor authentication (MFA), risk assessments, regulatory compliance, etc.
Why is Healthcare Data Security Important?
Today, over 85% of healthcare organizations are pursuing or adopting AI, but fewer than half have formal policies or monitoring in place. Similarly, only 13% of health system executives report having a clear AI integration strategy for clinical workflows. Despite housing a wealth of patients’ personal and sensitive data, healthcare organizations lack adequate safety measures to protect data.
Such statistics highlight a critical concern where healthcare organizations are racing to innovate and embrace AI technologies; however, they lack the foundational data security required to protect healthcare data against evolving risks and inadvertent data exposure. If such data falls victim to a breach, it can lead to identity theft, insurance fraud, and even compromised patient care services.
Additionally, as healthcare organizations increasingly migrate to the cloud, integrate data stores with networks and systems, and introduce new data-hungry applications, they become prime targets for cybercriminals to infiltrate and snoop on data assets. As long as electronic health records (EHRs) and interconnected systems continue to rise, there will always be a risk of data exposure. Therefore, robust healthcare data security is essential.
How Do Data Breaches Impact the Healthcare Industry?
The healthcare industry frequently experiences both internal and external threats. Data breaches not only impact the patients, but also vendors, stakeholders, and other associated businesses.
Several studies evaluate the impact of a data breach on patient behavior by comparing visits before and after the breach between affected and unaffected individuals. The findings disclosed that patients who experience a healthcare data breach are less likely to visit hospitals in the following months.
That’s not all, the healthcare industry as a whole faces far greater implications, such as erosion of patient trust and confidence in the healthcare facility and the institution as a whole, operational disruptions resulting in increased loss of revenue, regulatory pressure due to failure to adopt adequate security measures, resulting in financial losses and non-compliance penalties, and long-term reputational damage.
8 Common Challenges & Risk Factors in Healthcare Data Security
Protecting healthcare data doesn’t come without its set of challenges. Most common healthcare data security challenges include:
1. The escalating attack surface
Attackers are well aware of all data points that can be exploited, and reliance on multiple data vectors only escalates the threat surface.
2. Social engineering attacks
From ransomware to malware, attackers are targeting via email and rogue software to gain access to patient health data.
3. Legacy models and software
Healthcare institutions with limited resources rely on outdated data housing models and software that are riddled with vulnerabilities. Legacy systems are error-prone and lack the functionality to update as organizations scale.
4. Interconnected healthcare environment
Today, several interconnected networks, systems, applications, and devices exist that only make data security a complex challenge to achieve, especially when legacy systems are involved.
5. Lack of accountability
Lack of authorization and data stewardship results in no accountability of data handling practices from collection, processing, storage, to transfer and deletion.
6. Evolving risks and the human factor
Hackers are one step ahead in developing the latest techniques to infiltrate systems and exploit vulnerabilities and humans are the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain. This duo makes it increasingly challenging to rely on manual approaches to combat vulnerabilities.
7. Evolving compliance landscape
Regulatory authorities impose strict regulations on healthcare institutions to protect patient health data. Notable healthcare laws include HIPAA, HITECH, ACA, GDPR, EHDS, and PIPEDA, among several others.
8. Unsecure internet networks
Data is transferred through offline and online methods, both of which are susceptible to attacks. However, wireless networks are more susceptible to attacks as they often lack adequate security.
Best Practices for Effective Healthcare Data Security
You can’t protect what you can’t see. An effective healthcare data security posture requires detailed insights into patient data, who it belongs to, where it is stored, whether it is protected or requires additional guardrails, access entitlements, and much more.
Establish a robust data governance strategy
Align departments within the healthcare institution and third-party vendors on a uniform set of policies, practices, and automation when handling healthcare data. Ensure it aligns with regulatory requirements (security, access controls, assessments, transfers, etc) to avoid noncompliance penalties. Define accountability and conduct regular assessments for transparency. Begin this process by comprehensive data discovery and classification of data assets to determine what data needs protection and where.
Adopt automation
Leverage automation tools to address hypervolume data processing. Automate vulnerability scans, threat detection, access controls, data subject rights fulfillment, data backups, and cross-border data transfers, all while minimizing human errors and increasing response times. Gain comprehensive real-time visibility into the threat landscape and patch vulnerabilities as and when necessary. Migrate between networks, systems, and cloud environments at ease.
Maintain a robust data breach response plan
Ensure data breach incidents are detected, contained, and remediated swiftly, minimizing disruption to patient care. This requires defining clear roles, communication protocols, and conducting audits to test readiness.
Automate Compliance with Securiti DSPM
As regulatory pressure increases and data environments grow more complex, healthcare institutions can no longer rely on manual methods to ensure compliance. Ensuring healthcare data security requires a robust data security posture to ensure healthcare institutions comply with any current or future regulations.
Securiti's Data Command Center (rated #1 DSPM by GigaOM) provides a built-in DSPM solution, enabling organizations to secure sensitive data across multiple public clouds, private clouds, data lakes and warehouses, and SaaS applications, protecting both data at rest and in motion.
With Securiti, organizations can leverage contextual data intelligence and controls to discover and classify data, minimize ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial) data risk, reduce misconfiguration vulnerabilities, prevent unauthorized data access, understand data flow, and enforce consistent security controls across the data journey, including real-time streaming data, while also managing compliance and breach risk.
Using an extensive library of data connectors, Securiti automatically constructs a knowledge graph that captures rich metadata, regulatory information, policies, processes, and relationships among all these aspects.
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