The annual number of ransomware attacks more than doubled in that period from 43 to 91, for a total of 374 incidents that exposed the personal health information (PHI) of nearly 42 million patients, according to the research paper published by the American Medical Association’s JAMA Health Network.
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The researchers pulled data from the incidents reported to the U.S. federal HHS Office of Civil Rights (OCR) breach database, as required for HIPAA-covered organizations, and turned up 84 attacks that were not reported. They also discovered that 54% of the attacks were reported to OCR later than the mandated 60-day reporting period.
More details on ransomware’s toll on healthcare:
>>44% of the events disrupted patient care, 8.6% for more than two weeks. Hospitals were most likely to experience a disruption.
>>PHI records exposure increased more than 11-fold, from approximately 1.3 million in 2016 to more than 16.5 million in 2021.
>>During the five-year study period,…
