Temporal Trends and Characteristics of Reportable Health Data Breaches, 2010-2017

Abstract

Protections for private patient data and mandatory public reporting of breaches of data confidentiality were established by the 1999 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act. Between 2010 and 2013, data breaches involving at least 29.1 million patient records were reported. The ongoing transition to electronic health records may increase such breaches.1,2 We used public data to examine the nature and extent of breaches from 2010 through 2017.