Vendor CEO: Final Report

Respondents were asked to indicate the security tools they believed were most important to healthcare organizations in maintaining data integrity, both currently and in the next two years. Currently, firewalls were identified by 80 percent of respondents, making them the most frequently cited security tool for the third consecutive year (81 percent in 2003 and 46 percent in 2002). For the second consecutive year, user access controls (72 percent) and disaster recovery tools (67 percent) round out the top three.

Over half of survey respondents (56 percent) identified biometric technologies as a security tool that would be most important to healthcare organizations in the next two years. No other option was selected more frequently. This represents a substantial increase over the six percent of respondents who report that they presently use this technology. Rounding out the top three security tools of the future are electronic signature (48 percent) and data encryption (47 percent). In 2003, firewalls (72 percent) were identified as the tool that would be most important to healthcare organizations in two years. This year it was cited by only 40 percent of respondents.