As readers of this blog know, data breaches in the health care industry are all too common. Healthcare organizations are an attractive target for hackers because of the nature and amount of personal information that they possess.

Therefore, it is perhaps not surprising that healthcare organizations have the highest costs associated with data breaches. They also have significantly higher costs as compared to other industries.

According to the 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report recently released by the Ponemon Institute and IBM Security, which was based on in-depth interviews with more than 500 companies around the world who have experienced a data breach, the average total cost of a data breach in the healthcare industry was $6.45 million, or 65 percent higher than the average total costs of a data breach for other industries. Healthcare also had the highest average cost per record at $429 for each record compromised, much higher than other industries.