Healthcare Breaches During COVID-19: The Effect of the Healthcare Entity Type on the Number of Impacted Individuals.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in cybersecurity attacks on organizations operating in the healthcare industry. Health information professionals and health executives are unable to limit the impact of data breaches on records their organizations handle. While current research focuses on prevention strategies and the understanding of the causes of data breaches, it failed to address how to mitigate the impact of successful cybersecurity attacks. This quantitative research paper examined the effect the healthcare entity type has on the number of impacted individuals for healthcare data breaches that occurred during the pandemic. Health information professionals will be able to mitigate the number of breached records based on their organizational type. Some of this paper's findings include the call for implementation of organizational frameworks aimed to protect patient information, and the call for further research to understand how other factors might affect the impact of healthcare data breaches.