How Important is Cybersecurity for Healthcare Organizations?

As healthcare technology continues to evolve, the need for facilities to have comprehensive and current cybersecurity measures continues to increase. In fact, the majority of healthcare executives report that their spending on cyber threats has increased, according to recent IDC research.

The “Business Strategy: Thwarting Cyber Threats and Attacks Against Healthcare Organizations” report features findings from the 2014 IDC Insights Cross Industry Cyber Threat Survey, according to an IDC statement. The study wanted to understand how healthcare providers, financial services and retailers were all responding to the rise in online attacks. Moreover, the report shows how healthcare organizations specifically are investing more in cybersecurity options.

“For healthcare organizations, it’s not a matter of if they are going to be attacked but when,” IDC Health Insights Research Vice President Lynne Dunbrack said in a statement. “Healthcare cyber security strategies need to take a comprehensive approach and include not only react and defend capabilities, but also predict and prevent capabilities to effectively thwart cybercriminals.”

The report found that approximately 60 percent of healthcare executives increased their spending on cyber threats, while 38 percent stated that their cybersecurity spending stayed the same over the last three years.

For healthcare providers specifically, security is a top IT initiative, IDC explained. Security and risk management technologies was the number one initiative, cited by 29 percent of respondents. It was also the top initiative in 2013, cited by 20 percent of respondents.

One disturbing statistic was that all respondents of the 2014 IDC Insights Cross Industry Cyber Threat Survey reported that they had experienced a cyber attack in the past year. Specifically, 39 percent said that they were attacked more than 10 times and 27 percent of the attacks were described as “successful attacks.”

Overall, one out of four cyber attacks had an impact on normal business operations, according to the IDC report. The majority of respondents – 52 percent – indicated that the shortest impact lasted less than an hour and 43 percent said that the longest duration was between eight and 24 hours.

Earlier this month, IDC predicted that by 2015, 50 percent of healthcare organizations will have experienced one to five cyber attacks in the previous 12 months. Those were part of the results of IDC’s FutureScape report on predictions in the healthcare industry.

That data also showed that 80 percent of healthcare data will pass through the cloud at some point in its lifetime by the year 2020. This will likely happen because providers continue to implement cloud-based technologies and infrastructure for data collection, aggregation, analytics, and decision-making.

IDC also said that cloud technology will become more important. Specifically, 65 percent of consumer transactions with healthcare organizations will be mobile by 2018, IDC said. This move will require healthcare facilities to develop better omni-channel strategies.