According to a recent study from the Ponemon Institute, a privacy and information management research firm, incidents involving the loss of Personally Identifiable Information and Protected Healthcare Information (Data Breaches) cost U.S. organizations $204 per compromised record in 2009.

Ponemon’s annual U.S. Cost of Data Breach Study tracks a wide range of cost factors, including expensive outlays for detection, escalation, notification and response along with legal, investigative and administrative expenses, customer defections, opportunity loss, reputation management, and costs associated with customer support such as information hotlines and credit monitoring subscriptions.

Here are some recent incidents where the sensitive data of a healthcare or other type of organization has been lost or stolen due to a lack of adequate security systems. These incidents put these organizations at serious risk of being subject to fines, lawsuits, and bankruptcy:

• Names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers of roughly 28,000 state retirees were e-mailed to the Kentucky Retirement Systems (KY) without being properly encrypted for security purposes by its pharmacy benefit provider.
• The University of Florida (FL) discovered that a server was accessed by an unauthorized intruder from outside UF. This server contained an unencrypted file with names and Social Security Numbers for 97,200 people.
• The United Way of Miami-Dade’s (FL) computer system was hacked. The computer system contained personal information including credit card information.
• AES (NH), the service provider for Student Loan Xpress, transmitted names, addresses, Social Security Numbers, and dates of birth to another student loan lender with which AES contracts without being encrypted.
• A former employee of Occidental Petroleum Corporation in Tulsa (OK) "accessed and mishandled" personal information by emailing a spreadsheet containing information on former employees to a personal email account. The former employees’ data included names, addresses, birthdates, employee identification numbers, starting dates, retirement dates, and Social Security numbers.
• A former employee of building materials supplier Lehigh Hanson (NH) downloaded data after his termination. The downloaded data included files with employee payroll information of current and former employees.

Are you doing everything that you can to protect your healthcare organization from the catastrophe that will come from the theft or loss of its Protected Healthcare Information (PHI)? The Secure File Transfer System can help your healthcare organization to protect its PHI. The system controls and monitors access to PHI, automatically deletes PHI based on data retention policies that you set, and encrypts PHI while in transit across the Internet and in storage as well.