Free Custom «Security Breaches in the Healthcare» Essay Paper

Many of the security breaches in the healthcare occur in the IT departments and involve data handling. They may be caused by direct hacking or unauthorized access to healthcare databases due to laxity in handling of such data (Chickowski, 2010). Others who may cause security breaches in this sector are the malicious insiders who may seek to benefit from the electronic medical records and patients’ medical data.

One of the security breaches that have happened recently was in Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center that is based in New York. More than 132,000 of personal information for its patients were mishandled (Chickowski, 2010). This happened when thousands of CDs containing confidential patients’ data was lost during shipping. There is a possibility that these CDs could have landed in the wrong hands that could use the patients’ data to their advantage.

Another security breach occurred in a hospital in Chicago where an individual stole the identity of medical identity of a patient. This resulted in the medical history of that individual being put in the place of the genuine patient (Thompson, 2010). Medical personnel and nurses eventually administered treatment to the patient using the corrupted medical history and hence threatening the life of the patient. Unfortunately this led to the death of the patient.

 

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To prevent these kinds of security breaches in the healthcare, organizations need to employ proper measures of tracking data as it is transmitted from the databases to other systems. This may call for the healthcare organizations to invest heavily in the latest technology in database security. If such measures are implemented there will be a great reduction in cases of security breaches in the healthcare organizations that have been very rampant in the recent past.