"Researcher Explores Effect of Hospital Mergers on Data Breaches"
According to research conducted by a University of Texas at Dallas doctoral student, patient data is especially vulnerable during and after hospital mergers and acquisitions, when the likelihood of a cybersecurity breach more than doubles. Nan Clement, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the School of Economic, Political, and Policy Sciences, noted that the announcement of a merger is enough to cause an increase in data breaches. Clement analyzed hospital merger records and archived data breach reporting from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from 2010 to 2022. She discovered that in a two-year window around hospital consolidation (one year before a deal is closed and one year after), the probability of data breaches in merger targets, buyers, and sellers increased significantly. The probability of a data breach during the two-year window was 6 percent. In comparison, it was a 3 percent probability of a data breach for hospitals that merged over the course of the data set, but were not within the two-year window. This article continues to discuss the study on the impact of hospital mergers on data breaches.