How to Gauge the Financial Impact of Patient Data Security on Healthcare Brands

If you are a healthcare organization seeking to strengthen your cybersecurity efforts, you may be aware of the cyberattack that affected not-for-profit health insurer Premera Blue Cross. Some 11 million patient records were exposed, with the perpetrators hacking the system for months before their actions were detected. The main issue was a failure to manage risks and patch vulnerabilities—a failure that cost the organization over $84 million in fines and settlements. “If you are in the healthcare sector and want to gauge the impact of a security breach, it is vital to adopt several measures, it is vital to adopt several measures, ranging from assessing financial risks to tracking KPIs.

Assessing the Financial Risk to Your Organization

Healthcare organizations need to know the exact nature of the risks caused by cyberattacks. Historical data indicate that organizations that have fallen prey to cybercriminals have incurred costs of millions due to operational disruption, regulatory fines, legal settlements, insurance spikes, and patient losses. IBM reports that companies that experience healthcare data breaches spend an average of $10.1 million on post-breach expenses, while the average post-breach expense in other industries is $4.35 million. Expenses incurred include notifying affected customers, investing in new data security systems, and training employees. 

Calculating Your Overall Financial Risk and KPIs

To calculate your overall financial risk, use industry benchmarks and compute your Expected Annual Loss (EAL), which is the likelihood of a breach multiplied by its economic impact. For instance, if the probability of a breach is 20% and the impact per breach stands at around $1,000,000, your EAL would be $1,000,000. This would justify an expenditure of, say, $250,000 on prevention, because it would help you avoid a $1M loss per year. Having exact figures will allow senior leaders to decide on appropriate healthcare cybersecurity solutions, ranging from adopting new security systems to investing more heavily in security training for staff. Health organizations also need to calculate their overall ROI and track KPIs such as patient trust, churn, digital adoption, insurance costs, and attack prevention. They must understand how risk, trust, revenue, and efficiency all work together to keep their brand intact.

Measuring the Impact of Breaches on Your Brand

Health organizations can benefit from conducting research into the influence of data security on patient behavior. For instance, research published in 2025 in the International Journal of Research in Marketing has found that a single data breach incident leads to a 4.65% reduction in hospital visits. The impact of data breaches is more pronounced when the breach size, measured by the number of leaked records, is larger. Moreover, the impact of breaches caused by employees or insiders is greater than that of breaches caused by external actors. Another (2024) study has found that patients are very concerned about data privacy, confidentiality, and security.

Employing Cutting-Edge Tools

To measure factors such as patient visits, bookings, or portal usage changes before or after breaches, health organizations can rely on EHR/EMR analytics modules, which provide data on everything from referral drop-offs to patient churn. Reputation and sentiment analysis tools such as Press Ganey or Qualtrics PatientXM, meanwhile, can be used to measure changing patient sentiment. Other tools, such as Brandwatch, cover social listening, while media monitoring and share-of-voice tools like Cision track the extent and tone of news coverage.

Healthcare organizations must be aware that patient data security is not just a compliance requirement but also a direct driver of financial performance, patient trust, and long-term brand survival. To stave off hefty fines, healthcare organizations must adopt a multipronged approach that includes quantifying breach risk, tracking behavioral and reputational impacts, and investing in proactive security measures. Investing in data protection safeguards the financial stability and credibility that healthcare brands depend on.