Dive Brief:
- As providers adopt accountable care models — and cope with medical data exchange — health care leaders face new pressures to protect personal health information.
- According to a recent Ponemon Institute study, two-thirds of health care organizations that belong to an ACO believe that privacy and security risks have increased.
- To address this problem, providers use a wide range of techniques. For example, San Diego's Sharp HealthCare, which participates in both Medicare and commercial ACOs, exchanges encryption keys of the new entities, as well as imposing role-based access to PHI.
Dive Insight:
As ACOs become a more standard way of doing business for health care organizations, standard data protection techniques are likely to emerge for these complex organizations. In the meantime, health leaders are likely to grapple with difficult data protection problems as they integrate with multiple other health organizations in varied ways. If this isn't done right, it's a recipe for data loss.