Security News > 2020 > August > Healthcare breaches declined sharply during the first half of 2020

Despite the COVID-19 outbreak starting in the first half of 2020, data analyzed from the Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights Breach Portal shows that the number of patient data records breached dramatically declined during the early stages of the pandemic.

CI Security analysts assessment indicates that the number of breach reports in the first half of 2020 is down 10.4 percent compared to the second half of 2019, and the number of breached records is down nearly 83 percent, based on information that healthcare organizations are required to submit to HHS within 60 days of the discovery of any breach affecting more than 500 individual records.

"A combination of factors come into play for the numbers declining so precipitously during a global pandemic, including healthcare organizations misunderstanding HIPAA and COVID-19 exceptions issued during the pandemic, healthcare organizations simply being too busy to report, or organizations having been so distracted by the pandemic they are not aware they have already been breached," said Drex DeFord, Executive Healthcare Strategist, CI Security.

The first half of 2020 showed an 82 percent drop in records breached by healthcare providers.

Email was the top source of breaches in the first half of 2020, blamed for over 3M records breached in the first half of 2020, up 86 percent over the last half of 2019.

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