With global cybercrime costs projected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025, growing at a rate of 15 percent annually, healthcare organizations must strengthen their email security defenses.
Read more: Healthcare data breaches: Insights and implications
According to Medical Economics, in 2022, 71% of healthcare data breaches occurred due to unencrypted email communications. Modern encryption solutions like Paubox automatically secure all outbound emails, ensuring HIPAA compliance without disrupting workflow.
Read more: What is email security?
The cost of healthcare data breaches reached $10.93 million per incident in 2023, according to IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report. According to a study about deploying data loss prevention systems, the implementation of the DLP system resulted in a notable decline in data leakage incidents. Specifically, endpoint incidents fell from 41,023 in June 2017 to 18,458 by November 2017, while network incidents decreased from 12,377 to 854 during the same period.
Learn more: Email DLP (data loss prevention) for HIPAA compliance
Research on why employees click on phishing links suggests that despite training programs and awareness campaigns, employees continue to click on phishing links, with an average click rate of 14.2% in healthcare organizations. Advanced filters using AI can block these malicious emails before they reach inboxes.
Related: What is spam filtering?
The Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) states, “The use of MFA on your accounts makes you 99% less likely to be hacked”. Implementing MFA is vital in the Internet of Health Things (IoHT) as it serves as the frontline defense against cyberattacks targeting medical professionals, patients, and sensitive healthcare data. By incorporating hard-to-replicate factors like biometric recognition, healthcare organizations enhance the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of patient information.
Go deeper: Enhancing HIPAA compliance with multi-factor authentication
The OCR fined a medical practice $500,000 for sharing protected health information (PHI) with a vendor without a BAA. Standard email accounts aren't HIPAA compliant without a proper BAA. Leading secure email providers offer signed BAAs as part of their service packages.
Learn more: What is the purpose of a business associate agreement?
Failing to use these email security features can result in data breaches, HIPAA violations, financial penalties, legal action, and damage to your organization’s reputation. It also puts patient trust at risk.
Encryption protects the content of emails by converting it into a secure format that can only be read by authorized recipients. Secure email gateways filter incoming and outgoing emails to block threats like phishing and malware.
A noticeable reduction in phishing emails reaching your inbox, indicating that advanced spam and phishing filters are blocking threats. The absence of reports about accidental data leaks or breaches also suggests that encryption and DLP tools are functioning as intended.