Topic starter
24/06/2026 7:34 pm
TL;DR: Healthcare breaches cost an average of $9.77 million in 2024, more than double the cross-industry average, while the Change Healthcare attack affected 192.7 million Americans and disrupted claims and care operations for months, according to 1Kosmos. The lesson is that identity controls in healthcare now shape clinical resilience, not just compliance posture.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by 1Kosmos: “Why Healthcare Identity Is 5 Years Behind”.
By the numbers:
- In 2024, healthcare organizations experienced an average breach cost of $9.77 million per breach, more than double the $4.45 million average across all industries.
- The Change Healthcare ransomware attack affected 192.7 million Americans, nearly 60% of the entire US population.
- Between 2023 and 2024, the number of affected individuals in healthcare breaches increased 58% to more than 289 million.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when identity governance is limited to compliance checklists?
A: Governance becomes too slow to stop real risk.
Q: Why does weak patient identification create risk in healthcare workflows?
A: Weak patient identification increases the chance of duplicate records, overlays, and treatment decisions based on incomplete information.
Q: What are the signs that patient identity management is failing in a healthcare organisation?
A: Common signs include duplicate medical records, repeated chart cleanups, outdated identifiers, and staff spending significant time correcting errors after registration.
Practitioner guidance
- Implement phishing-resistant authentication on exposed healthcare workflows Prioritise remote clinician access, administrative access, and any internet-facing server that supports clinical or claims operations.
- Bind patient enrolment to high-assurance identity proofing Use biometric or document-backed verification for portal enrolment and telehealth onboarding so account creation is tied to a verified person before access is granted.
- Map and segment third-party access paths Inventory every insurer, clearinghouse, billing, and support connection, then enforce least-privilege access and separate those paths from clinical systems and device networks.
Bottom line: Healthcare identity failures can now interrupt care delivery, not just expose records or create compliance findings.
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25/06/2026 4:56 am
Healthcare identity is now a patient safety control, not an admin convenience. The article is right to move the discussion away from compliance checklists and toward clinical impact. When access decisions affect medication delivery, claims processing, and care continuity, identity governance sits inside the operational safety model. Practitioners should stop treating healthcare IAM as a back-office function and start measuring it by service resilience and patient impact.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 55% of healthcare data breaches now originate from a third-party vendor, according to Ponemon Institute’s 2023 Third-Party Risk in Healthcare report.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Should healthcare organisations prioritise passwordless access or network segmentation first?
A: They should prioritise the highest-risk workflow first, usually exposed clinician access or patient enrolment, and then segment the systems that would suffer most from a compromise. Authentication reduces theft risk, while segmentation limits spread, so the sequencing depends on where the greatest operational blast radius sits.
👉 Read our full editorial: Healthcare identity modernization is now a patient safety issue