Does cloud computing threaten patient privacy, data security?

Grazed from HealthITSecurity. Author: Jennifer Bresnick.

The rise of cloud computing has created a host of new challenges for patient privacy and data security, according to two Seton Hall School of Law professors. In a white paper released last month, Frank Pasquale and Tara Adams Ragone assert that government regulators need to issue new laws to specifically protect health data security as data transfer and exchange becomes more facile and ever more prevalent.

Whatever their merits in other areas of business, cloud models have come under scrutiny when used in the healthcare arena,” Pasquale and Ragone say. “Patients are rightly concerned about critical health data being lost or inappropriately accessed. On the one hand, cloud service providers may reduce those risks by deploying their unique expertise. On the other hand, the more entities access data, the more chances there are for something to go wrong. Risks along many dimensions—legal, reputational, medical, among others—need to be addressed.”…

“Cloud services suffer from certain vulnerabilities,” explains the paper. “For example, cloud services are at the mercy of internet access. Prolonged internet outages, such as recently experienced during Hurricane Sandy, create real risks that healthcare providers will not be able to access critical information when it is most needed. Privacy is also a renewed concern, as breaches of massive databases, even if they are less likely to occur than scattered breaches, are far more menacing to privacy and security.”…

Read more from the source @ http://healthitsecurity.com/2013/07/25/does-cloud-computing-threaten-patient-privacy-data-security/