Data Security Assignment: HIPAA, Data Breaches, and Healthcare Sector

This assignment solution delves into the critical aspects of data security, particularly within the healthcare sector. It begins by defining data security and its importance in protecting digital privacy, computers, databases, and websites from unauthorized access and data corruption. The solution then explores how data security is addressed within the context of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), emphasizing the protection of patient health information in digital formats. The assignment further examines a significant data breach involving the American Medical Collection Agency, detailing its impact on various healthcare entities such as Quest diagnostics, LabCorp, and BioReference, and the compromise of sensitive patient data, including personal, financial, and medical information. The solution concludes with a list of relevant references.

Running head: DATA SECURITY
DATA SECURITY
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1
DATA SECURITY
Table of Contents
Question-1..................................................................................................................................2
Examples of how data security is addressed in HIPAA.............................................................2
Breach in Health Information.....................................................................................................3
References..................................................................................................................................4

2
DATA SECURITY
Question-1
What is data security?
Data security specifically puts forward the meaning of protecting of the digital
privacy and the measures that are taken to prevent all of the unauthorized access to that of the
computers along with the databases as well as the websites. Measures of Data security also
provides the protection against the data getting corrupted. Data security in reference to the
recent times, forms the primary aspect of every IT organization belonging to every size as
well as the type (Rao & Selvamani, 2015). This term is also referred to as Information
Security or Computer Security.
Measures of Data Security particularly includes methods such as the likes of
practicing the data security with the help of proper authentication. Along with the
authentication, every single individual user shall provide with a password along with that of a
code, the related data of biometry (Bertino, 2016). In addition to this, some other forms of
data that is specifically needed to verify the identity of the user right before the user wants the
access to the system as well as the data, which shall be granted accordingly.
Examples of how data security is addressed in HIPAA
HIPAA Security rule provisions the physicians to provide protection to the patients by
securing all the related information to the patients that are present in digitalized form, hence
providing protection to the health information belonging to every single patient.
For example, a patient visiting a healthcare sector for treatment, has to fill in some
forms, along with that of the identification papers. All of these information is specifically
stored within the digital database of the organization (Cohen & Mello, 2018). Having
completed the procedures, the individual patients information is under the responsibility of

3
DATA SECURITY
the health organization to provision with protection abiding by the rules and regulations
under HIPAA.
Breach in Health Information
In the month of May, 2019 the Securities and Exchange Commission had made
revelations that the services of billing related vendor American Medical Collection Agency
had been barged in for a period of eight months ranging from August 1, in the year of 2018 to
that of March 30, in the year of 2019.
After the breach was revealed, a number of covered entities have been placed forward
to report the data related to patient that had been compromised with the hacking activity.
However, the scope belonging to the breach is still continuing along with this the total
amount of patients that had been impacted with the breach activity is also being investigated.
According to the recent research, an approximate amount of 12 million patients from
the Quest diagnostics had been affected. Up to 7.7 million LabCorp patients along with that
of 422,000 patients of the BioReference had been directly impacted with the occurrence of
this breach (Liu, Musen & Chou, 2015). The system which was hacked had the inclusion of
personal as well as financial data from the giant of lab-testing along with the inclusion of
Social Security numbers as well as medical information.

4
DATA SECURITY
References
Bertino, E. (2016, March). Data Security and Privacy in the IoT. In EDBT (Vol. 2016, pp. 1-
3).
Cohen, I. G., & Mello, M. M. (2018). HIPAA and protecting health information in the 21st
Century. Jama, 320(3), 231-232.
Liu, V., Musen, M. A., & Chou, T. (2015). Data breaches of protected health information in
the United States. Jama, 313(14), 1471-1473.
Rao, R. V., & Selvamani, K. (2015). Data security challenges and its solutions in cloud
computing. Procedia Computer Science, 48, 204-209.