Survey Paints Mixed Picture of Security Compliance for Healthcare Industry

According to a recent survey of IT managers, the healthcare industry has made considerable gains in security and compliance when compared to other sectors. 

The survey, from DataMotion, a Morristown, N.J.-based email encryption software and health information service provider (HISP), discovered that 90.4 percent of healthcare IT managers say their company has security and compliance policies for transferring files electronically. Approximately, 84 percent of respondents said their employees/co-workers have the capability to encrypt email and 86 percent are striving for full compliance. 

Overall, DataMotion found that healthcare was above other industries in terms of security and compliance. Still, the industry is not without faults, the survey revealed. For instance, 87.7 percent of respondents said their company permits the use of mobile devices for email, 40.3 percent report there is no bring your own device (BYOD) policy and 11.7 percent are unsure.

"It’s good to see improvements in security and compliance since last year, and healthcare has made significant gains, but serious problems remain and new ones have cropped up,” DataMotion’s Chief Technology Officer, Bob Janacek, said in a statement. “For healthcare specifically, there have been widely publicized incidents of mobile devices being lost or stolen that contain protected health information, potentially resulting in a HIPAA breach."

For the survey, DataMotion polled more than 400 IT and business decision-makers across the U.S. and Canada. Thirty-seven percent were from healthcare, the largest industry sampling.