LinuxQuestions.org - 'Evaluation of Causes of Protected Health Information Breaches.'

Quote:

theft by outsiders or unknown parties (370 [32.5%]), disclosing PHI through mailing mistakes by employees (119 [10.5%]), and theft by former or current employees (102 [9.0%]) were the 3 major causes of PHI breaches. These causes were followed by employees taking PHI home or forwarding it to personal accounts or devices (74 [6.5%]) and hacking or information technology incidents committed by undisclosed parties (70 [6.2%]). Overall, 603 PHI breaches (53.0%) were internal, attributable to the health care entities' own mistakes or neglect.

Breaches were located in mobile devices (524 [46.1%]), paper records (326 [28.7%]), and network servers (333 [29.3%])...

Among the 232 breaches (20.4%) that occurred during PHI communication, 152 (65.5%) were mailing mistakes and 80 (34.5%) were emailing mistakes....

Our analysis of 1138 PHI breaches from 2009 to 2017 that affected 164 million patients indicates that more than half of the cases were not from external causes but were attributable to internal mistakes or neglect....

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...rticle/2715158 in February's JAMA Internal Medicine