At a time when 37% of hospitals are losing money, the pressure is on to find innovative ways to drive profitability. For many hospitals pursuing growth and innovation, patient engagement—which is linked to benefits like improved financial performance and better health outcomes—is emerging as a new path forward. Digital-first patient engagement strategies are gaining traction as hospitals explore tools and technologies for enhancing the patient experience, such as using patient portals and apps to improve patients’ access to their data. But before hospitals rush to embrace new patient engagement technologies, they need to address one key priority first: protecting the data these tools rely on.
Leveraging technology to improve patient data access is just half the equation. To effectively build patient trust and maintain a high standard of care quality, hospital and health system leaders must take steps to make sure their patients’ data is both highly accurate and secure.
Patients’ Concerns About Data Accuracy And Security
As more patients access their data online, prioritizing data accuracy and security is becoming even more essential. My company recently surveyed over 1,000 healthcare consumers to understand their perceptions about their healthcare data. The results showed that the majority of patients have concerns about the accuracy and security of their data.
Our survey found that nearly all healthcare consumers (94%) feel healthcare data is important and that eight in 10 consumers (82%) are concerned about the potential for errors in their healthcare data—meaning that there is value in giving patients access to their medical records, but it must be done responsibly and accurately.
Errors can have significant impacts on patient care, including medication issues, incorrect treatments, delayed diagnoses or adverse outcomes. Our survey showed that most patients have experienced an error themselves: nearly two-thirds of healthcare consumers (62%) found an error in their healthcare data. Of this group, 88% said this error impacted their care, emphasizing the link between data accuracy and patient care. For patients to feel confident in the quality of care they receive, it’s crucial that their data is as accurate as possible.
Data security is another major area of concern for healthcare consumers. When asked about data security, 86% of respondents were concerned about the possibility of their healthcare data being involved in a data breach. This isn’t surprising considering the many data breaches the industry has seen recently. In 2024 alone, the industry experienced a record-setting number of breached records, with more than 276 million healthcare records breached.
Given these concerns, there’s a clear need for hospital leaders to take meaningful steps to reinforce the accuracy and security of their data. This is key to strengthening patient trust and ensuring the success of patient engagement strategies.
How Hospitals Can Ensure Data Integrity And Data Security
Data accuracy is critical in healthcare. In addition to fostering patient trust, highly accurate clinical data is essential for providing quality care, maximizing reimbursements and guiding performance improvement.
When 80% of clinical data is unstructured—such as image scans, lab results, doctors’ notes or other formats that need to be interpreted and curated—achieving high levels of accuracy for this data can be challenging.
That’s why it’s important to go beyond conducting a quality assurance check at the end of the data curation process. Instead, clinical experts need to perform multiple quality checks throughout the data lifecycle. Complex or critical data elements, like those related to patient outcomes or reimbursement, should be subject to targeted quality assurance. This process should also include a combination of automation and human expertise. Human experts are ideally suited to understand and interpret nuanced clinical terms. Artificial intelligence is built to consume and review large volumes of data and flag inconsistencies for humans. This combined approach helps ensure accuracy and efficiency at scale.
As data breaches continue to make headlines, protecting data security is bound to remain a top priority for healthcare leaders. It’s important to keep in mind that hospitals are not the only organizations susceptible to data breaches—any third parties they work with are at risk, too.
For this reason, healthcare leaders must make sure that in addition to ensuring their internal teams follow strict data security protocols, any third parties they work with should as well. Ideally, third-party organizations should follow a strict security culture that goes above and beyond the baseline market standards. Hospital leaders looking for third parties they can trust with their data should prioritize those with SOC 2 + HITRUST certification. This combined certification reflects a commitment to complying with the highest clinical data standards in the industry.
Final Thoughts
As patients become more involved in managing their care, the demand for accessing their healthcare data will only grow. With greater access to their healthcare information, patients can take a more active role in their care and better understand their care needs, which can result in improved health outcomes, greater patient satisfaction, higher retention and increased financial success for hospitals.
This all begins with giving patients access to data they can trust. When hospitals prioritize data accuracy and security, they’re doing more than meeting industry standards or addressing patients’ immediate concerns—they’re laying the groundwork for lasting trust, deeper engagement, better care experiences and better outcomes for all patients.
Read the full article on the Forbes website here.
