UCLA Health Care announced in July 2015 that they had become yet another victim of data hackers. This event may have involved up to 4.5 million individuals. UCLA Health Care had a vulnerability with data encryption, which is a way to enhance the security of a message or file sent over the public internet by scrambling the contents so that it can be read only by someone with who has the correct encryption key to unscramble it.
The continued hacking threats to major health care providers is a major industry security concern. This data hacking event appears to have gone on undetected since September of 2014 until its recent discovery. The compromised information included personal data that thieves love, such as Social Security Numbers, medical records, ID numbers and addresses.
eFileCabinet provides Document Management Software (DMS). This software includes 256K (military grade) encryption. eFilecabinet’s Secure Drawer is an application within the software that includes additional security measures.
These high level security enhancements include:
- 256K Encryption standard
- Optional password to view the information (much stronger security than email)
- Optional a retention policy (information can be purged at a set time and date)
- No size limit on information that needs to be shared
- with standard email transmission there is a size limit
Additional security measures provided by eFileCabinet DMS Software that help prevent a data breach such as the one suffered by UCLA Health Care include: Audit Trails, Roles Based Security, individual and group permissions, and robust retention policies.
The frequency of major data breaches in indicative of the skills that can be deployed by hackers, many of which are off-shore. Medical identity theft is a bad problem that is only getting worse. While credit card identity theft financial liability is limited by federal law to $50, the majority of victims of medical identity theft paid an average of $13,500 to resolve the crime. Only 10% of respondents report achieving a completely satisfactory conclusion of the data breach incident. Those who resolved the crime spent on average more than 200 hours on such activities as working with their insurer or healthcare provider to make sure their personal medical credentials are secured and can no longer be used by an impostor and verifying their personal health information, medical invoices and claims and electronic health records are accurate.”
Contact eFileCabinet and receive a free consultation and demonstration of secure document management services and the additional positive impacts it can have on your organization. The increased efficiency realized by implementing a well-designed document management system can provide a return on investment alone.