Heather Arthur, Director of Privacy Strategy at BluesightDespite decades of investment in privacy programs, unauthorized access to patient records remains a persistent and costly challenge for healthcare organizations. Patient privacy breaches cost an average of $9.8 million per incident and include snooping on friends, coworkers and family members and looking into the charts of celebrities. Here are 10 ways to strengthen patient privacy protections in your organization, enabling you to identify potential inappropriate accesses and strengthen your privacy operations. Use audit logs and monitoring tools, which can be integrated with EHRs, to review all accesses to patient records and to identify any suspicious accesses. Investigations into privacy breaches – whether through internal misuse, such as inappropriate access or through external threat actors – help ensure compliance, protect sensitive data, and maintain patient trust.