Most Veterans Administration Data Breaches From Paper Documents Not PCs 50
CowboyRobot writes "'Between 96 and 98 percent of our [data breach] incidents — it varies from month to month — deal with physical paper where people are not thinking about the fact that that piece of paper they're carrying around making benefits determinations has sensitive information and they need to protect it,' said Stephen Warren, VA acting assistant secretary for information and technology. 'If you consider the fact the VA has about 440,000 people that we service and that the department over 900,000 devices on the network, [a data breach count relating to IT assets] of somewhere between one and 10 in a month is pretty good,' Warren said. 'And many of those are things disappearing in inventory. Many are found subsequently because they got moved somewhere.'"
paper is still less dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
When there is an electronic data breach, there are hundreds or thousands or more records. When it is a paper breach, it is probably less than ten records at once.
Computers aren't good enough yet (Score:4, Insightful)
Not this case specifically, but in my experience where documents exist and travel in electronic form, you still print them off to do work on them.
Computers are great tools for writing documents. Computers are great tools for looking up and reading out a single datum. Computers are great tools for large-scale data analysis. What they are not good for is sitting down with a modestly-sized group of data - say, twelve letter-sized sheets - and getting something done. You can't get a screen big enough, or an interface lean enough, to replicate the kind of easy access you get from spreading the pages across your desk, or even using fingers and bookmarks to quickly jump between places. The relationships between individual documents are never as obvious as when you pull out a sheaf of records and pore over it.
So, people print documents off while they're working with them, and sometimes they forget that those documents are supposed to be shredded, or meticulously filed away.
Now, this is something that computers should be good at, but it's hard, and it's not in the wheelhouse of most software developers or companies. Look at scientific publications. You have a whole lot of documents encrusted in rich, well-formatted meta-data, being used by organisations that could throw down thousands on records-management software like it was loose change. Yet we only just have Papers and Mendeley. We're only just transitioning away from filing cabinets.
Re:Computers aren't good enough yet (Score:4, Insightful)
I should add that this is a problem for data security; there seems to be a mistaken belief that we entered a paperless world in 2000 and all our information security problems are now computer security problems.
Paper has a lot of benefits (Score:4, Insightful)
It's 2013, they should have finished scanning all of their documents in by 2002, 2005 at the very latest. What on earth are they printing over there?
Patient medical charts and financial information mostly. Getting all that digital is an incredibly difficult and a FAR more challenging problem than most people realize. In a lot of cases the economic case for paper is actually better because going digital is so difficult and/or expensive.
I work in a regulated industry and we shred everything we print. On a bad week I might print all of 10 pages.
The industry you work in has precisely NOTHING to do with how healthcare can or should be managed. That would be like me saying what works for engineering should be perfectly appropriate for accounting. the argument makes no sense. As it turns out health care is incredibly complex and designing IT systems to do away with paper is difficult, time consuming and frequently not actually the most efficient way to solve many of the problems they face. If there is a more complicated industry than health care I'm not aware of it. Just because theoretically we can solve problems with IT doesn't mean it can be done today or that it is necessarily the correct answer to every problem.