Most 2016 Healthcare Data Violations From Unauthorized Approach

While most of the top healthcare data violations in the year 2015 were because of hacking, the majority of the greatest breaches so far this year stem from other problems.

Last year is often referred to as the “Year of the Hack” for healthcare, with the majority of healthcare data violations being caused by third-party cyber attacks. The top 3 tragedies alone combined to potentially affect almost 100 million individuals, and were all involved hacking.

So far, 2016 is not immune from healthcare data violations, but the leading cause of incidents is unauthorized access, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) data breach reporting database.

There have been 114 tragedies reported to OCR between Jan. 1, 2016 and June 1, 2016. Of those, 47 were classified as being caused by unauthorized access or disclosure. The rest of the classification breakdown is as follows:

• 34 - hacking/IT incident


• 26 - theft


• 5 - loss


• 2 - improper disposal

However, the greatest healthcare data breach so far this year was because of a hacking incident.