Total number of compromised records down 30 percent in 2020
PARCA eNews – Jan. 22, 2021 – There were 642 large data breaches involving more than 500 records reported by healthcare providers, health plans, healthcare clearing houses and related businesses according to a report in the HIPAA Journal. That represented a 25% increase over than 2019, which was also a record-breaking year based on data collected by the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which published the raw data on its website.
Overall, the report shows that healthcare data breaches have doubled since 2014 with an average of 76 breaches being reported to OCR each day in 2020. That resulted in a breach or privacy for more than 29 million records, which was 29.7% lower than 2019 in terms of total number of compromised records.
2020 was the third worst year for number of breached healthcare records behind 2015 with over 113 million records breached and 2019 with nearly 42 million records breached.
In December the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI issued an alert warning of stepped up cybersecurity activity targeting healthcare and public health agencies. (See related post)
The largest healthcare breach in 2020 was a ransomware attack on the cloud service provider Blackbaud, Inc. which does not appear on the OCR data as each client of the company reported the breaches of their records separately, consequently the total number of records breached in the Blackbaud attack is not known, but is estimated at more than 10 million.
Other notable breaches included Trinity Health with more than 3 million records compromised, followed by MEDNAX Services with nearly 1.3 million records breached.
Sources: HIPAA Journal and OCR Breach Notification Portal
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