Healthcare data breaches hit an all-time high

Healthcare data breaches hit an all-time high in 2023 as cybersecurity concerns continue to plague the industry. Data breaches — in which hackers steal personal data — continue to increase year-on-year: there was a 20% increase in data breaches from 2022 to 2023.

As more and more companies experience crippling security breaches, the wave of compromised data is on the rise. Data breach statistics show that hackers are highly motivated by money to acquire data, and that personal information is a highly valued type of data to compromise.

More than 133 million patient records were breached last year, more than double the number in 2022 (51.9 million), according to the analysis of HHS data.

Meanwhile, the 725 breaches affecting 500 or more patient records also set a record in 2023, and was more than twice the number of total breaches in 2017.

It is the standard notice many health care organizations are required to provide when your protected health information gets exposed — and in 2023, data leaks, hacks, and mishandling led more of them to be delivered than ever before.

The largest data breach of 2023 was the hack of Nashville, Tennessee-based HCA Healthcare, which affected 11.3 million patients, followed by a cyberattack on medical transcription vendor Perry Johnson & Associates (9 million individuals) that has ensnared multiple health systems, per HIPAA Journal.

That number has more than doubled over recent counts, driven primarily by a surge in hacking and ransomware attacks on health care organizations regulated by the privacy rule HIPAA.

It’s no secret that data breaches are costly for businesses. To calculate the average cost of a data breach, security institutes collect both the direct and indirect expenses suffered by the breached organization.

In 2024 alone, healthcare data breaches have affected over 11.6M people. Experts say, we are in a new era of digital privacy concerns and we must urgently address to avoid unintended consequences.