Faith.

The gut feeling someone has when they ask a complete stranger to watch their stuff while they go to the bathroom.

Blind faith.

The unconscious belief allowing us to eat-out twice a week even though we have never met, let alone seen, the chef that is responsible for making our food.

In the wake of the Yahoo Hack, where 500 million user accounts were stolen, we are forced to think about all of the places we are unconsciously believing will take care of our precious data.

While the damage of the Yahoo Hack was limited to a few spam emails on accounts that are probably inactive by now (sorry Yahoo, but you aren’t all that hot anymore), situations like this are more common than we think and have calamitous effects.

For instance, a Russian group known as the Fancy Bears Hack Team broke into the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) records and released positive drug-doping results of Simone Biles and the Williams Sisters. Not only does this tarnish the reputation of these athletes, but also looks bad on the validity of WADA.

And here’s your wake-up call: 47% of Americans have had their medical record hacked in the past 12 months. Excuse me? That’s absurd! Basically, either your record or my record is sitting on the hard drive of a very malicious person.

Our unfortunate hospital visits rely on the faith that our doctor knows what they’re doing, and our blind faith in the system that gave them their stamp of approval. And these are two very important things to think about, but we don’t even think twice about the fact that we just hand out our information all willy-nilly and don’t think about how securely it is handled.

By no means am I suggesting that you avoid giving out your information at a hospital, but there needs to be some solution to this.

The black market is paying big bucks for your medical information, which is worth 60x more than your credit card number, so you can imagine there are a lot of evil-minded people focusing all their efforts on cracking into doctors’ and hospitals’ records.

With your general information, social security number, insurance file, credit card number, and entire medical history on file, they hold a lot of power. Best case scenario: they open a line of credit up under your name. Worst case scenario: they wipe-out or change the medical history of thousands of patients, causing a huge blockage in operations resulting in poor treatment and even loss of lives.

Next time you are in a hospital or getting your flu shot take a look at the nurse’s computer terminal. Are the USB ports on her computer in plain sight and quick reach? This isn’t something you would see if you walked up to a teller at a bank.

Yes, there are a lot of problems that exist in healthcare data security, but it’s not like nothing is being done. You need to realize that twenty years ago, there were no standards for data security in hospitals, and often times they were still using paper records. The adoption of EHR (electronic health records) and CPOE (computerized physician order entry) systems has allowed the medical workforce to become more mobile and efficient, but also increased security issues.

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) was enacted in 1996 and has made monumental progress in cyber protection, but it takes time for changes to be made nationwide, and they often find themselves reacting to situations as opposed to predicting and preparing.

Honestly, it’s a common happening across all industries, especially in business. How often do you find yourself reacting when you should’ve already been prepared? Probably more often than you’d like. Really the only way to stay ahead of the curve is to continue looking at the horizon and adapting.

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