Institutional investment in health data protection predicted to double by year-end

Black Book revealed that 77% of all executive respondents share the growing concern of readiness to respond to potential breaches as currently assigned under the Chief Information Officer and/or Chief Information Security Officer.

Eighty-one percent report this issue is largely based on the underfunding budgets and the training and expertise of technology leaders unfamiliar with either the healthcare industry and/or cybersecurity.

“The direct cost of a data breach to the organization’s bottom line is obvious and most institutions were insured against early incidents, but the loss of customer loyalty and trust, and the associated patient revenue in the wake is now being closely evaluated by hospital boards and financial executives,” said Doug Brown, founder of Black Book.

Eighty-five percent of CFO respondents, as compared to 79% in Q1 2018, seek greater compliance to proactively audit access to protected health information, while avoidance of civil and criminal penalties is the motivation for enhancing cybersecurity by 80% of financial executives surveyed.

The delayed administrative transition from a manual, labor-intensive auditing process to an automated, all-in-one-solution for monitoring patient privacy to ensure the safety of patients and the security of their records is the most challenging aspect of their position, according to 92% of all Compliance Officers surveyed.

Eighty-two percent of CIOs rated their organizational initiatives as “Unprepared” by NIST standards, as did 88% of all other executives polled.

“One of the top board priorities in 2019 is cybersecurity, yet instead of adding to the CIO’s plate of functional duties, security has morphed a standalone set of practices into a strategic initiative,” said Brown. "As a result of the potential financial impact of data breaches, C-Suites are shifting the leadership to CFOs and hiring Informations in health systems."

From Q1 2019 through Q2 2019, the Black Book Research healthcare cybersecurity solutions client/user survey investigated 234 IT security functional category vendors utilized by over 2,400 validated client users for the solutions vendor ratings. In total, 641 Patient Privacy Monitoring specific solution users qualified to respond to this year’s CISO/CIO and healthcare IT leadership provider survey subset including ad hoc polls to identify trends and industry challenges.