Sohan Dua, MD, got the bad news in a phone call one morning in February 2017: His practice had been hacked.
The EHR system shared by Dua and his wife, Kiran Dua, MD, had been breached and hackers were holding their patient data for ransom. That attack sent the couple, who practice in Northridge, Calif., on a months-long ordeal that cost their separate practices time, money, and service interruption.
Dua, a nephrologist, never thought he and his wife, a primary care physician, would join the ranks of healthcare providers and organizations that have suffered crippling cyber attacks. Luckily, their losses were at least partially covered by the combined $100,000 cyber coverage they had through their medical malpractice insurance. The insurer also provided them with experts to help recover from the attack.
Even with that assistance, however, their practices were forced to shut down for several months while they dealt with the attack. “We still don’t know how much money we lost,” Dua says. “We lost patients, too.”
The growing threat of being hacked has more primary care physicians buying cyber insurance, according to experts. But what those policies cover, how they…
