The news about data breaches always seems to be dire lately. Some good news: data breaches in the healthcare industry were lower in October than in September, based upon reportable data breaches to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Note that only breaches involving more than 500 records have to be disclosed to the OCR at the time of the breach, so these are not the final numbers.

Healthcare providers reported 19 breaches, Health Plans reported six breaches and business associates reported two breaches in the month of October. The total number of records breached in October in the healthcare industry was 71,377.

Fourteen of the breaches were due to unauthorized access and disclosure, eight were caused by hacking or an IT security incident, four were the result of theft and one was caused by loss.