Healthcare providers are at the forefront of rising demand for cyber liability coverage, believes Brad Gow, vice president of Endurance, speaking in the autumn edition of Healthcare Risk Management Review.
“There is huge growth in demand for cyber insurance and healthcare is one of the main drivers of this in the US,” he said. “The top tier healthcare organizations are all buying security and privacy insurance now and some middle tier regional healthcare organizations and smaller hospitals are following suit.
“They realize the need for the coverage; they are reading about fines and penalties in the press and seeing an increase in consumer class actions arising out of these publicized breaches.”
Bob Parisi, network security and privacy practice leader at broker Marsh, added that there are two main factors driving demand for cyber liability coverage. One of these is that fact that protected health information (PHI) has surpassed or exceeded financial information as a target for criminals, becoming a highly valuable commodity.
“The other factor is that with the HITECH amendment of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the loss of healthcare data is now treated in much the same way as loss of any other personally identifiable information – so hospitals, and basically anyone who holds healthcare data will be subject to the same rules as if they lost birth date or social security numbers; the forensics cost, the legal cost, the cost of sending out notice and offering a remedy – all these expenses are now a factor when PHI is lost or mishandled,” he said.
Read the whole story in the autumn edition of Healthcare Risk Management Review, out soon.
Healthcare, cyber demand, endurance
