Morning Headlines 2/5/15
Health Insurer Anthem Hit by Hackers
Anthem, the country’s second-largest health insurer, is reporting that hackers broke into a database containing personal information for 80 million customers. Investigators are still assessing the damage, but early reports suggest that “tens of millions” of records were stolen.
AMA is partnering with a Chicago incubator to create a health IT lab focused on growing startups that will drive efficiencies and improve care delivery for physician offices.
Under Armour Just Bought 100 Million Users Worth of Fitness Data
Under Armour acquires calorie counter app MyFitnessPal for $475 million and fitness app Endomondo for $85 million, growing its digital health ecosystem to 100 million active users.
I don’t know if this sounds harsh, but I am starting to believe that the fines levied against provider and payer organizations is starting to be included in the costs of doing business. Not only Anthem, but recently Senior Health Partners of New York experienced a breach. Some of the breaches and loss of PHI is due to some basic breakdowns in process and control. As a service provider to the HC market, it is laughable about the C suite reaction to proposals to review their privacy and security, process, admins and technical. Comments like we have it covered, our people are great, everything is fine, we have internal controls. The real issue is that no one want to be exposed and they are not transparent to their board about where their weaknesses are.
So the fines will continue and PHI will continue to be attacked because the hackers now know that provider and payer organizations are apathetic about the whole thing. The industry was told that 2015 is the year of healthcare hacking! Maybe the fines and penalties don’t have enough teeth to make it seem more than a journal entry to a provider payer P&L.
pundit-would have to agree with your assessment. Joe Swedish’s remarks are flat-out bs. They lost personal information, not only of adults, but also children who have social security numbers, yet have never used them. As someone who has been a vendor in the healthcare IT area for many years, I know all too well that when it comes to security, the guys sitting in the big chairs just haven’t wanted to spend the money necessary. CHS and Anthem should stand as examples. In my opinion, the fines should be exorbitant. Offering the free credit monitoring services is a day late and a dollar short. Touting the fact that medical data at this point is safe doesn’t give me the warm fuzzies, I’m very concerned about my social security number.