Hitech and HIPAA

Provide feedbacks on each of those findings based on the reports from the Breach Portal https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report…on the Office for Civil Rights website and the list of breaches of unsecured protected health information.

1st subject

The HITECH Act has become increasingly important in light of the alarming number of patients affected by breaches of unsecured health information. Over the past 24 months, a staggering total of 159,277,181 patients were impacted, as reported by the US Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights Breach Portal. The breaches have occurred in every state across the nation. Notably, states with the highest number of breaches include Texas with 78, New York with 60, and California with 55. Conversely, states with the lowest number of breaches were South Dakota, Wyoming, and New Mexico, each having only 1 or 2 incidents. Among the various breach types, hacking or IT incidents have emerged as the most common, with intrusions into network servers being the primary method employed, closely followed by email breaches. 

Reference: 

US Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights Breach Portal: Notice to the Secretary of HHS Breach of Unsecured Protected Health Information. (2024). https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf

2nd Subject 

When reviewing the United States (U.S) Department of Health & Human Services website, I was able to export the information into an excel spreadsheet and discovered that breaches occurred in 50 states with 159,273,843 people affected during a time span of July 2021 through January of 2024. The top four states that had the most people affected by the breaches were Colorado, Tennessee, Florida and Texas. Colorado was identified as the top state with breaches with 14,917,394 people affected. The covered entities were identified as four entities (in order from most affected people to least affected); Business Associate, Healthcare Provider, Health Plan and Healthcare Clearing House. There were five types of breaches ranging from Hacking incidents, unauthorized access disclosure, theft, loss, to improper disposal. Locations of the breaches varied. The locations of the breaches were identified in electronic medical records, servers, desktops and emails and more. The top location of breaches was identified in the network server location which accounted for 136,347,008 people affected followed by email. With the server being the top location for the data breaches, opportunities for companies to stay in compliant are identified. Companies should really invest in a good cyber security team to protect their servers and ither electronical business functions from being hacked and potentially impacted millions of people.