We’re pleased to announce a new THaW paper, to appear in the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS), June 23-24, to be held at Penn State.

Juhee Kwon and M. Eric Johnson.  Meaningful Healthcare Security: Does “Meaningful-Use” Attestation Improve Information Security Performance?

Abstract:
Voluntary mechanisms are often employed to signal performance of difficult-to-observe management practices. In the healthcare sector, financial incentives linked to “meaningful-use” attestation have been a key policy initiative of the Obama administration to accelerate electronic health record (EHR) system adoption while also focusing providers on protecting sensitive healthcare data. As one of the core requirements, meaningful-use attestation requires healthcare providers to attest to having implemented security mechanisms for assessing the potential risks and vulnerabilities to their data. In this paper, we examine whether meaningful-use attestation is achieving its security objective. Using a propensity score matching technique, we analyze a matched sample of 925 U.S. hospitals. We find that external breaches motivate hospitals to pursue meaningful use and that achieving meaningful use does indeed reduce such breaches. We also find that hospitals that achieve meaningful use observe short-term increases in accidental breaches, but see longer-term reductions. These results have implications for managers and policy makers as well as researchers interested in organizational theory and quality management.

We’ll post the paper itself after the workshop.