Extract from Doug Austin’s article “Protecting Healthcare Records These Days is Like a Game of “Whac-a-Mole””
You’ve probably either played the game “Whac-a-Mole” yourself as a kid, or you watched your kid play it, at a Chuck E. Cheese or another similar arcade. It’s a simple game with five holes in which moles pop up and a soft rubber mallet to pop them on the head with – you get points for every time you pop one on the head. The game starts out slow at first, and it’s easy to keep up with the moles that pop up. But it gets faster and faster until several moles are popping up at once and it’s impossible to keep up with them all.
The job of protecting protected health information (PHI) regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is becoming more like a game of “Whac-a-Mole” where it’s been increasingly difficult to protect all the places where PHI can appear, expanding the risk of exposure of that data.
Impacts from a Recent Healthcare Cyber Attack
Here’s one example of one recent ransomware attack that impacted many healthcare organizations.
