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As a direct result of COVID-19 burnout, the ongoing Great Resignation trend might be impacting healthcare more than any other industry. Research shows that healthcare has already lost an estimated 20% of its workforce over the past two years. This turnover is happening top-to-bottom throughout organizations. Doctors are switching between hospitals, administrative staff are leaving the industry, and technology teams are being lured away by higher paying jobs in other sectors.
The high volume of turnover in the industry is having a broad impact. According to one study, 60% of organizations have had to change their care model; 48% have had to reduce inpatient capacity; and approximately 40% have made reductions in operating room and ambulatory clinic capacity, increased emergency department diversion, and increased length of stay.
Security is yet another critical area of operations feeling the effects of The Great Resignation. Last year, Netskope Threat Labs found a 300% rise in employee data theft during their last 30 days of employment. So with unprecedented levels of human resources churn across the industry, how can healthcare organizations ensure that their proprietary data and other sensitive information doesn’t leave with a departing employee?
Greater risk to research data
At a typical research hospital, researchers will apply for grants from government agencies and/or private institutions. While grants are awarded for a particular project and researcher, the funding typically belongs to the facility where the research is being done. In most cases, the resulting data from the project also belongs to the research hospital—while the researcher gets credit for the work and has access to data while employed by the institution. For researchers, getting credit is usually the most important factor. While there are instances where a researcher may pre-arrange some kind of shared usage rights or ownership of project data by written agreement, it’s much more common for facilities to maintain sole ownership of the research being done by their employees.
What sometimes happens, though, is that a researcher makes a name for themselves and gets lured away to another facility. On their way out the door, they may want to take some project files with them—even though those materials explicitly belong to the institution they’re leaving. I’ve actually seen this firsthand. I was part of a security team when a researcher tried to take their data with them when they left and the organization objected.
Collaboration across institutions (such as between a university and an affiliated research hospital) is another common area where these sorts of data ownership conflicts can arise. Most often, the organizations sign a business associate agreement (BAA) that outlines who is responsible for the resulting protected health information (PHI) data. But a lot of times, data transfer happens outside the terms of the agreement—without the security or IT team’s knowledge. And once proprietary data is exfiltrated from the institution, it can be nearly impossible to put