Health Plan Cybersecurity Trends and Risk Management Response Preparations

Personal information is an extremely valuable commodity for cybercriminals. These cyber attackers are chipping away at the critical infrastructure of our healthcare system at a volume that cannot be ignored.

New regulations around interoperability and patient access rules can create more vulnerability for patient data and the onus on balancing data sharing and data security is on health plans. With breaches costing companies millions of dollars per incident, let’s take a look at cybersecurity trends and what actions health plans can take to protect themselves from the rising frequency of cyber threats, including automation of security measures.

In this report, we detail the latest cybersecurity trends, such as cost per health record breached and the root causes of breaches, especially from insider threats We also share a summary of feedback we received from industry stakeholders on their perceived cyber risk and related cybersecurity concerns. Among these areas of concern is the rise of hacking via automation, since human hackers now comprise less than half of all cybercriminals.

We asked health plans and other stakeholders what risks they are most concerned with, how they’re allocating budget toward cybersecurity efforts, who owns identity and access management within their organizations, their level of confidence in their current authentication measures and more. The answers to these questions help to reveal current cybersecurity trends and provide guidance on key strategy steps health plans should consider.

With the growth in interoperability and data sharing comes increased vulnerabilities. Health plans need to be able to assess the risk of both physical and digital identity attributes to help them balance security with ease of use.