More than 97 percent of healthcare organizations report having security and compliance policies in place for transferring sensitive information, including files and emails, yet 73 percent of healthcare employees violate the policies, according to a DataMotion survey.
The survey gathered responses from more than 700 IT and business professionals in the country, 300 of which were from the healthcare industry.
Here are 13 more statistics on email and file security in healthcare.
- Of those who violate policies, 52.7 percent said it was because employees are not aware of the policy or that it had been violated. Approximately 29 percent said they were aware of the policy but didn't understand it, and 18.2 percent said the policy was purposely violated to get a task done.
- Healthcare organizations are ramping up programs to improve policy adherence. Sixty-four percent of survey respondents are conducting ongoing training and 44.6 percent are using technology to increase adherence. Just 7.4 percent of respondents said they were not doing anything to boost policy adherence.
- Approximately one-quarter of respondents report their healthcare organizations are not able to encrypt email. Additionally, smaller healthcare organizations, those with fewer than 100 employees, were less likely to encrypt email (66.7 percent do encrypt) than large organizations with more than 1,000 employees (87.3 percent do encrypt).
- Of healthcare respondents that provide email encryption and allow mobile email use, 31.3 percent do not have the ability to secure their email from their mobile client. Size of organizations plays a role in mobile email encryption as well: 56.7 percent of small healthcare organizations don't enable mobile email encryption compared to 27.8 percent of large organizations that don't enable mobile email encryption.
- Approximately one-quarter of healthcare respondents with encryption policy are not confident in the policies to provide adequate security against an email-related data breach.
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