No matter lessons learned from previous incidents, healthcare facilities continue to embarrassingly report laptops and flash drives containing patient information misplaced, lost and stolen, even in the face of increased regulatory procedures demanding more and better security through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the more recent Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act.
From inside medical centers and through outside medical and therapy practices, multi-millions of dollars are being fraudulently taken but government prosecutors are getting tougher.
For healthcare security executives, bomb threats often come out of the blue or from disgruntled current and former employees. But some can come from a disgruntled patient.
An emergency operations plan (EOP) provides the structure and processes that a healthcare facility and its security and safety operation use to respond to and initially recover from an event. The EOP is therefore the response and recovery component of an emergency management program.
Healthcare security and safety executives have more in common than they have differences and share more of their core mission than enterprise security leaders serving other industries.
Overall crime at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania decreased 21 percent during 2012, and there was a 13 percent decrease in crime at Penn Presbyterian Medical center since 2011.
While traveling abroad, a doctor had an unencrypted laptop containing information on roughly 3,500 patients stolen and this incident lead to a million dollar plus fine.
In August 2010, the International Association for Healthcare Security & Safety (IAHSS) published a survey of healthcare security executives which revealed an increase in violent crimes within the reporting hospitals.
