Alaska Health Department Services Affected by Malware Attack govinfosecurity.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from govinfosecurity.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
GovInfoSecurity
Compliance
Compliance
HealthInfoSec) • April 20, 2021 Get Permission
Given the surge in the use of telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic - and expectations for continued growth - the Healthcare and Public Health Sector Coordinating Council has unveiled guidance on safeguarding patient data during remote care encounters.
The recommendations include implementing encryption, enhancing monitoring capabilities and using privileged account management tools.
FAIR Health, a nonprofit organization that tracks health insurance claims data, found that telehealth claims to private insurers grew 4,347% from 2019 to 2020 as a result of remote care during the pandemic, HSCC notes.
And the research firm Frost & Sullivan projects a sevenfold growth of telehealth by 2025.
Get Permission
Many of the major health data breaches added to the federal tally so far this year involve business associates, continuing a trend in recent years.
The largest breach added so far in 2021 to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services HIPAA Breach Reporting Tool website – which lists health data breaches affecting 500 or more individuals – is a vendor hacking incident reported on Jan. 29 by Florida Healthy Kids Corp., a provider of children s health and dental health plans in Florida.
That breach – reported as affecting 3.5 million individuals - involved Jelly Bean Communications Design, a website hosting vendor that the health plans provider says failed to address vulnerabilities over a seven-year period, leaving patient data potentially exposed. Plus, the hackers tampered with some of that data, Healthy Florida Kids Corp. said in its breach notification statement last month.
Get Permission
Nebraska Medicine and the University of Nebraska Medical Center have just begun notifying 219,000 individuals of a hacking incident that was discovered last September. The lag between breach discovery and notification illustrates the difficulties organizations often face in incident response, some security experts say.
Nebraska Medicine/UNMC says in a statement posted earlier this month that on Sept. 20, 2020, it identified unusual network activity that affected some of its IT systems.
Nebraska Medicine/UNMC then initiated incident response protocols to minimize any disruption to patients and isolated potentially impacted devices and shut off select systems as a precaution, the statement says. We also initiated an investigation, computer forensic experts were engaged to assist our ongoing investigation and we notified law enforcement.
Epidemiologists wage a battle against more than just the virus
Updated December 13, 2020, 2:30 a.m.
Email to a Friend
Theyâre looking out for all of us, and yet they get death threats
Re â âMakes you ask why the hell we even botherâ â: In her front-page article last Sunday, Hanna Kruegershines a light on some extremely painful and honest feelings voiced by several epidemiologists in our area. Dr. Ashish Jha, Dr. Michael Mina, Dr. Sara Suliman, and Dr. Caroline Buckee, all putting in massive hours of work for these many months, share their personal and professional frustrations and even dejection.
Some of these medical experts even have to cope with death threats and now have to worry about their familiesâ safety. This is outrageous. When did so many in this country become so disrespectful and unwilling to listen to science? For those with children, how do they explain their actions?