The Business Impact Analysis, Essay Example

Goals and Purposes of the BIA

The business impact analysis (BIA) is necessary to identify the critical functions of the business continuity program. The goal of the BIA for healthcare providers under HIPPA compliance law is to determine how to best protect sensitive patient information from hackers and employee carelessness. This will include the identification of direct and indirect costs related to security. In this situation, direct costs are the costs of establishing security measures and the indirect costs are the expenses that healthcare providers will incur if there is a breach. An additional consideration is the maximum acceptable outage (MAO).

Summary of Findings

Since patient records are often required for treatment, the MAO for healthcare providers is low. Outages are directly related to a failure of the company to gain a profit. Thus, services need to be made available immediately. Ultimately, an outage can contribute to a negative impact on the company’s image, profitability, and survivability.

Prioritizations

It is essential to prioritize security breaches that can result as a consequence of compromised networks. Although reduced system access can also result in a lack of ability to serve patients effectively, healthcare providers can suffer a greater degree of economic impact by failing to protect sensitive patient information. Violations of HIPAA result in high fines which may eventually require the business to shut down.

IT Systems and Applications Impacted

Typically, hackers attack the web server to determine which information has been sent to insurance companies. This is one of the situations in which healthcare providers are not required to send deidentified patient data because this communication is necessary for the provider to receive payment. Hackers can use malware to take screen shots of this information and then use it for their own purposes.