According to the Ponemon Institute and Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report[1], the health industry experiences more data breaches than any other sector. Healthcare data breaches are the costliest, with an average cost of $9.23 million per incident (IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report/2021)[2].
Healthcare was the top industry in average total cost for the eleventh year in a row.
The top five industries for average total cost were:
- Healthcare
- Financial
- Pharmaceuticals
- Technology
- Energy
The average total cost for healthcare increased from $7.13 million in 2020 to $9.23 million in 2021, a 29.5% increase. Energy dropped from the second most costly industry to fifth place, decreasing in cost from $6.39 million in 2020 to $4.65 million in 2021 (27.2% decrease).
Other industries that saw large cost increases included services (7.8% increase), communications (20.3% increase), consumer (42.9% increase), retail (62.7% increase), media (92.1% increase), hospitality (76.2% increase), and public sector (78.7% increase).
There are several risks associated with the security breach, as:
a. It contains private information like SSN/Name/associated health issue/disease.
b. It can disrupt business operations, leading to delayed surgeries, loss of patient history, delay in providing healthcare to critically ill patients, etc.
c. It affects top-line growth due to loss of customer trust.
d. It also leads to penalties for non-compliance with HIPAA/other security mandates.
These risks signify the need for enhancing the existing security measures and even introducing stronger/newer alternatives to combat the challenges and ensure robustness in healthcare systems.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) recommends healthcare institutes integrate multi-factor authentication to ward off these attacks. Though many healthcare organizations still consider it optional, two-factor authentication/Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) — is an indispensable part of a secure environment, and key to protecting your medical data.
Why should you choose Silence Auth?
Silence Auth provides an all-encompassing solution to meet the security needs of the healthcare industry. With its seamless and hassle-free multi-factor authentication, it is a fitting solution to address the security loopholes present in the industry.
· More Time With Patients:
With Silence Auth’s simplified, seamless, contactless MFA solution, healthcare providers save time in the authentication. By saving time, more patients could be attended to, and more time could be spent on each patient. This ensures the delivery of top-quality service, which is a critical success factor for healthcare institutions.
· Improved Hygiene:
The ever-important personal hygiene has once again drawn attention in the ongoing pandemic as it has been among our first lines of defense to ward off infections, ensuring a healthy life.
With contactless authentication, the risk of catching infections (COVID, flu, etc) and other communicable diseases is reduced — thereby, ensuring the personal well-being of the employees (doctors/support staff). This improved focus on employee well-being has a direct positive impact on attracting resource pool and the quality of service delivered.
· Proactive Compliance with HIPAA:
In a highly regulated, high-risk industry like healthcare, compliance is especially important. Our solution complies with HIPAA and other existing privacy protection acts.
· No more unattended workstations:
With the unattended workstations posing risks of unwanted data access and security breach — proximity-based continuous verification provided by Silence Auth eliminates all these risks leading to a direct impact in terms of cost savings, better end-user acceptance, and compliance.
· Flexibility of Device:
Providing employees the security and flexibility in the use of devices goes a long way in making sure potential breaches that can happen outside the primary healthcare institution are avoided. Other benefits include, but are not limited to:
a. cost-efficient solution
§ no additional equipment to be purchased
§ lesser training costs due to device familiarity
b. platform agnostic — eliminates dependency on hardware
c. ease of use for doctors/staff as they are familiar with their own device
Silence Laboratories has designed a patented and niche authenticator framework: Silent Auth which brings an unseen balance between user experience and security.
Silent Auth brings in a) proof of liveliness, b) proof of possession, c) proof of co-location, and d) provides a multi-modal multi-factor auth framework to beat the aforementioned vulnerabilities.
Please contact us for a demo and further details: info@silencelaboratories.com
References
[1]Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigation Report.(May, 2021)
https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/
[2]IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report.(July, 2021)
https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/OJDVQGRY
CEO, Co-Founder
