Hospitals need to be ‘vigilant and proactive’: why OCR is asking for a $78 million budget

The HHS Office of Civil Rights is asking to nearly double its fiscal 2024 budget to $78 million to deal with a growing number of health data breaches, its director said. Politico.

Melanie Fontes Reiner said the agency’s budget has remained unchanged for two decades, even though the number of violations has quintupled in that time to reach 50,000 last year, according to a March 17 article.

“We see hospitals that have had ransomware embedded in their systems for years,” she told the news outlet. “Numbers don’t get smaller, they get bigger. It is imperative that hospitals and other healthcare organizations are vigilant and proactive.”