Healthcare Organizations That Had Information Systems Attacked

Use the World Wide Web and find two current instances where healthcare organizations had information systems attacked or otherwise compromised. In one page, using APA style formatting, summarize the attacks and determine if the organization reacted appropriately, too slow, etc. Be sure to cite the references from where you obtained your information.

Being a retired Air Force veteran I use TRICARE for my families health coverage and this news hit me hard and had me worried. It was on September 13th, in San Antonio, Texas, when an SAIC employee (Science Applications International Corp.) was taking backup tapes of health record data from one facility to another when the parked car was broken into and their GPS, stereo, and all of the Electronic Healthcare Records were stolen. There were approximately 4.9 million military beneficiaries that could be affected by this theft of EHR's (Bird, 2011).

Each member of my family received a letter in the mail from TRICARE several weeks after the theft to let us know our records were part of the ones stolen. I was shocked and angered by the delay in this reporting. I work for the Air force as a contractor and did not hear about this until I received my letter. We were told in this letter that " The thief would need specialized IT training to retrieve any data from the computer tapes." (Bird, 2011). This was reassuring in the sense that the thief would have to have access to the specific hardware and software, as well as having knowledge of the system and data structure (Bird, 2011).

In my honest opinion, I feel that TRICARE acted too slowly in letting its beneficiaries know about the theft. I understand certain things have to happen with investigations, but to receive a letter 4 to 6 weeks later was difficult to accept. Fortunately no one's records have been accessed by the thief and thus our medical information has been deemed as secure.

Work Cited

Bird, J. (2011, October 2). Contractor data breach compromises 4.9M...