Abstract

Providing security to Health Information is considered to be the topmost priority when compared to any other field. After the digitalization of the patient's records in the medical field, the healthcare/medical field has become a victim of several internal and external cyber attacks. Data breaches in the healthcare industry have been increasing rapidly. Despite having security standards such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), data breaches still happen on daily basics. All different types of data breaches have the same harmful impact on the healthcare data especially on patients' privacy. The main objective of this paper is to analyze why healthcare data breaches occur and what is the impact of these breaches. The paper also includes the possible improvements that can be made in the current standards such as HIPAA to increase security in the healthcare field.