The healthcare industry manages some of the world’s most sensitive and valuable data, from patient health records to genomic data and financial information. As this data’s volume, variety, and velocity rise, so do the cyberthreats. 88% of hackers who attack healthcare entities do so for financial reasons. Additionally, healthcare has the highest annual data breach cost in the US at $7.13 million. For security professionals working in healthcare, protecting this data is not only a regulatory requirement but a matter of patient trust and operational resilience.
Common Types of Healthcare Data
Most breaches of healthcare data include protected health information (PHI), electronic health records (EHRs), personally identifiable information (PII) like names, addresses, emails, and social security numbers, sensitive data of patients and doctors, insurance details, billing information, laboratory test results, prescriptions, imaging files, and clinical research data. It’s worth mentioning that PHI managed by hospitals is usually in electronic form, also known as electronic protected health information (ePHI).
The healthcare industry must address the evolving threats landscape by implementing security-by-design strategies to protect sensitive data across endpoints, cloud environments, and throughout its lifecycle—in transit, at rest, and in use. Achieving this demands a layered, intelligent data-centric security strategy.
Regulations Shaping the Healthcare Industry
The health systems, hospitals, and post-acute care (PAC) providers, such as inpatient rehabilitation facilities, long-term care hospitals, nursing facilities, and home health agencies, confront the overwhelming task of complying with growing regulations. Regulatory frameworks such as HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), HITECH, AI legislation, GDPR, and increasingly state-level privacy laws like the CCPA set strict expectations around how health data must be managed and protected.
Failure to comply can lead to steep fines, legal action, and reputational harm. For example, HIPAA violations can result in civil penalties ranging from $141 to over $2.1 million per violation, based on the severity and intent. Criminal charges may apply in cases of willful misconduct, carrying additional fines and possible jail time.
To protect healthcare data and avoid costly penalties, security teams must ensure accurate data classification, prevent unauthorized access by implementing role-based access control (RBAC), conduct periodic risk assessments, and develop a detailed plan for data breach response to security incidents and adhere to relevant regulations like HIPAA, HITRUST, and GDPR, ensuring data privacy and security are maintained.
Top Data Security Challenges in Healthcare
- Data Sprawl: The rise of consumer-driven healthcare has expanded direct patient interactions through connected devices. While digital and mobile services drive growth, they generate more consumer data across EHR systems, medical devices, research databases, online channels, and third-party applications, increasing exposure, risk, and the attack surface.
- Third-Party Risk: Healthcare organizations rely on vendors, suppliers, and partners for everything from billing to telehealth, and each connection introduces risk. Effective vendor management is vital for protecting health data and reducing risk to PHI from a third-party breach.
- Insider Threats: The healthcare sector has high rates of internal threats, whether from negligence or malicious intent. About 78% of healthcare data breaches come from hackers or IT incidents regarding the disclosure of PHI.
- Lack of Visibility: Identifying sensitive, business-critical, and protected health information (PHI) can take some time. Many healthcare providers lack complete visibility into where sensitive data resides, who has access, and how it is being used.
- Legacy Infrastructure: Outdated systems and medical devices with limited patching capabilities increase vulnerability to cyber threats and attacks.
- Ransomware and Targeted Attacks: The healthcare sector continues to be a prime target for ransomware, with 60% of attacks leading to data exposure or operational disruption.
- Cloud Migrations: Healthcare organizations transferring digital assets from on-premises to cloud-based environments take on a complex endeavor with privacy, security, and data management issues that can lead to non-compliance. As 93% of cloud services in healthcare carry a security risk of medium to high.
- Non-Compliance: The healthcare industry must demonstrate compliance with various government and industry-specific regulations in an automated, data-centric, and cost-effective manner. Regulatory non-compliance can result in steep fines and penalties for organizations and executives.
- AI Security: AI is transforming how health organizations use data—but it must identify whether the data involved is sensitive, personal, confidential, or regulated, which can expose critical gaps in traditional controls. As AI adoption accelerates, security leaders must rethink their data security, privacy, and compliance approach to avoid emerging threats, breaches, data leaks, and regulatory penalties.
How a Multinational Pharmaceutical Safeguards Patient and R&D Healthcare Data with BigID
This pharmaceutical company turned to BigID to help discover all sensitive and critical data (including R&D, patients, trials, drug formulas, and more) to create a single source of truth for enabling tighter internal security controls and meeting compliance and regulatory requirements.
- Discovery of All Healthcare Records: Scanning all healthcare-related records, including clinical trials, R&D, drug formulas, and more to address sensitive data blind spots.
- Minimizing Data Risks in Collibra: Expanding metadata to enrich Collibra by incorporating technical, business, & operational metadata, helping reduce data risk and maintaining privacy-aware governance practices.
- Establishing a Single Source on Data: Establishing a single source of truth about their data environment, paving the way for better, consistent decision-making around their data initiatives for the first time.
- Maintaining HIPAA Compliance: Uncovering all sensitive PHI and ePHI data across the entire environment, ensuring HIPAA compliance and consistent data policy enforcement.
How BigID helps healthcare protect patient data, reduce risk, and achieve compliance
BigID’s industry-leading data privacy, security, compliance, and AI data management platform helps to find, understand, manage, protect, and take action on high-risk and high-value data using a data-centric, risk-aware security approach.
Know Your PHI Data
With BigID, companies can find, manage, and catalog all of their patient information across the landscape — no matter how siloed — and enforce policy across all their data.
Leverage ML-based Classification
BigID automatically classifies protected health information (PHI) via next-gen classification that leverages pattern-based discovery, ML classification based on NLP and NER, AI insight based on deep learning, and patented file analysis classification.
Clean Up Your Data and Minimize Risk
Identify and remediate duplicate, similar, redundant, and derivative structured and unstructured data that contains sensitive patient data — and enact policy-driven retention management.
Drive Effective Interoperability
BigID is an API-first platform ensuring that integration and orchestration with other enterprise infrastructure are high-impact and straightforward. Manage, monitor, and validate third-party data transfers, and comply with regulatory requirements.
Integrate Consent and Preference Management
BigID’s ability to correlate granular data knowledge to data subjects transforms consent capture processes into a practical inspection and validation tool for collecting and processing patient data.
Accelerate AI Security & Governance
BigID efficiently builds policies to govern AI based on privacy, sensitivity, regulation, and access to control the data shared with LLMs and AI applications. Use AI with responsible guardrails to manage and protect proprietary information, intellectual property, and trade secrets.
Comply With Privacy and Protection Regulations
Proactively protect PHI data — from legacy stores to cloud environments to comply with HIPAA, HITECH, AI legislation, GDPR, and increasingly state-level privacy laws like the CCPA. With BigID, healthcare organizations get visibility and complete coverage of their sensitive, regulated, and high-risk data.
BigID empowers security professionals in healthcare to take control of sensitive data, reduce risk, and meet regulatory obligations with precision and confidence. Book a demo to see BigID in action!
