Security

As anyone who's ever worked for IT security can attest, the job is no walk in the park. New threats, compliance mandates, vulnerabilities and updates are constant. But with strong leadership, and a culture of compliance and responsibility to match, many healthcare organizations have shown it can be done right -- and well.

After nearly five years at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, Chief Privacy Officer Joy Pritts will be leaving her post later this summer.

Kevin Johnson is a professional hacker -- albeit a self-described ethical one. As head of the security consulting firm Secure Ideas, his job involves probing into organizations' networks and applications to identify vulnerabilities. What he sees in healthcare terrifies him.

The University of Cincinnati Medical Center is at the center of a legal battle that is the nightmare of every healthcare organization corporate counsel. The allegation is that a financial services employee of the hospital accessed the detailed billing records of a patient with a sexually transmitted disease and deliberately and maliciously published those records on Facebook, taunting and ridiculing the patient.

A Pennsylvania-based hospital is notifying nearly 2,000 patients of a HIPAA breach after an employee accessed and transmitted patients' protected health data outside of the hospital's secure network.

Does your organization have a comprehensive data governance program? If not, you're not alone. But you're also not close to where you should be if you want to provide better care at lower cost, according to a new report.

Healthcare's all about the patients, right? But far too often, there's a disconnect -- the idea that the care ends when the patient exits the building or a diagnosis is made, the idea that clinical deals with clinical and information technology deals with IT.

Apple on Monday touted its working with the Mayo Clinic as it rolled out an app that would piece together healthcare information from many third-party apps -- including one from Mayo -- to give consumers a comprehensive medical view on a mobile device.

It seems that everybody under the sun has been asking "you're in the cloud, right?" But it's important to take a step back and realize that not all clouds are equal. Maybe it's time for people to be asking, "Are you doing the cloud right?"

Identity management and unauthorized data access by employees present the biggest threat to security and privacy of patient data, according to healthcare providers across the country.