This week’s blog post for IPRO’s blog is about the difficulty of protecting healthcare records and how shadow information can leave those records vulnerable.

You’ve probably either played the game “Whac-a-Mole” yourself as a kid, or you watched your kid play it, at a Chuck E. Cheese or another similar arcade. It’s a simple game with five holes in which moles pop up and a soft rubber mallet to pop them on the head with – you get points for every time you pop one on the head. The game starts out slow at first, and it’s easy to keep up with the moles that pop up. But it gets faster and faster until several moles are popping up at once and it’s impossible to keep up with them all.

The job of protecting healthcare records regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is becoming more like a game of “Whac-a-Mole” where it’s been increasingly difficult to protect all the places where PHI can appear, expanding the risk of exposure of that data.

So, what’s a recent $4.75 million example that illustrates the difficulty of protecting healthcare records? And what is “shadow information”? You can find out on IPRO’s blog here! Aren’t you too old for childish games? 😉

So, what do you think? How does your organization address protecting healthcare records? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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