Protecting patient privacy and helping health systems stay compliant with complex security and privacy requirements is a challenge in the best of circumstances, and in today’s ever-changing technological landscape, it can be nearly impossible. One particularly thorny issue that the industry has been wrestling with has been the emergence of new technologies that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to aid compliance teams in detecting and remediating threats to privacy.  Traditionally outside the province of compliance teams, such platforms are powerful, but often poorly understood, additions to a modern privacy team.

At Protenus, we value moving quickly -- continually iterating to improve our state of the art healthcare compliance analytics platform. Combine this rapid development cycle with a steadily growing customer base, and we find ourselves needing new infrastructure resources at a dizzying pace.

In 2015 and 2016, Protenus found that the privacy of professional athletes’ medical records was violated equal to or more than any other VIP or celebrity category. The majority of these privacy violators were repeat offenders. Why? In many cases, Protenus found that football enthusiasts were looking for a competitive edge in their fantasy league by looking at the athlete's records to identify injuries or other types of vulnerabilities.  

In July and August, it appeared that there were some signs of progress in terms of how long it took to discover a health data breach.  While we’d like to report a new emerging trend, unfortunately the data provided a false sense of improvement.  In the same time frame, healthcare has also experienced an uptick in the number of hacking incidents, which are often quickly discovered due to the effect they have on an organization’s daily operations.  As a result, some of this improvement may simply be attributable to more hacking, rather than faster discovery, though we’ll be tracking this carefully.  Indeed, while hacking is quickly detected, insiders continue to go unnoticed, creating a costly aftermath for both healthcare organizations and patients alike.