Since 2009, the majority of all large HIPAA breaches have been traced to the loss or theft of electronic equipment or storage media. Hacking, on the other hand, has been linked to only 8% of beaches, according to a recent blog on the Healthcare IT News website.
Lee Bendekgey, chief compliance officer, for DNAnexus, says that implementing an IT system that enables secure sharing of information without the need to transport it on a computer or storage media — the cloud — can cut down dramatically on data breaches.
According to the blog, the use of the cloud can also facilitate enforcement of encryption requirements. So even if data somehow become accessible to an unauthorized person, they would be secured and could not be read unless the hacker also obtains the encryption key.
Read the blog.