Lisa Gallagher: Ramp Up Breach Detection

Hospitals and other healthcare organizations need to identify data security breaches "in a much more systematic way" to help ensure the privacy of personal information. That's the advice of Lisa Gallagher, senior director for privacy and security at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. Gallagher, one of the nation's leading healthcare data security experts, advises hospitals to "go beyond compliance" with federal regulations to "implement an active security risk management process." She also urges hospitals to allocate adequate resources to security so they can address potential threats identified in their risk assessments. A recent survey by Chicago-based HIMSS found that most hospitals spend less than 3% of their IT budget on security, a level Gallagher calls inadequate. As the federal government provides billions of dollars in funding for electronic health records through Medicare and Medicaid incentive payments, the government and the industry "need to make sure adequate resources are applied to security," she adds. In addition, she notes that HIMSS advocates widespread use of data encryption as a "best practice."