The Effectiveness of Big Data Breach Response Strategies in the Healthcare Industry: A Mixed Methods Approach

    Project: Research project

    Project Details

    Description

    Due to the widespread collection of personal customer data and the ever-increasing connectedness of our economy, the negative consequences of big data breaches have become increasingly severe for targeted organizations, especially for organizations in the healthcare industry. Prior studies have consistently found that healthcare data breach costs are among the highest across industries. Particularly, the lack of trust resulting from big data breaches in healthcare organizations make doctor-patient communication even more difficult. As big data breaches have occurred with increasing regularity in recent years, it is critical to understand how a breached healthcare organization can best undertake recovery actions. Prior literature on data breaches and information systems security have largely focused on organizational implications of data security incidents and issues related to security governance, policies and employees. There is little work understanding response strategies in the context of data breaches in healthcare organizations. In our recent work on the effect of compensation on customer outcomes, we witnessed breached organizations have employed various response strategies to mitigate the negative effects of big data breaches. Although these provide a starting point for understanding of recovery actions, the retail context in which our prior work has been conducted is dramatically different from the healthcare industry and associated data breaches.

    We aim to study the effectiveness of big data breach response strategies in the healthcare industry. To accomplish this specific research objective, we will first start by developing a typology of response strategies that serve as a springboard guiding future work on organizational response strategies to big data breaches in different industry contexts. To develop the typology, we will conduct a three-phase study using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to develop a typology of big data breach responses. This typology will be broadly useful but will serve as the underpinning for us to then develop and test a model that highlights the mechanisms of the combined effects of big data breach responses on patient outcomes in the healthcare industry. Overall, this proposal contributes to theory building in the domain of data breaches by proposing a typology of big data breach response strategies. Further, prior research has been in the retail industry and contextual investigations are needed for knowledge advances and theoretical contribution. Finally, the project will have implications for managers in the healthcare industry who need to employ interventions to change injustice perceptions following data breaches. We focus on the effectiveness of response strategies after big data breaches in terms of restoring affected patients’ justice perceptions, which predicts critical outcomes (e.g., positive customer sentiment) in the context of the healthcare industry. This is an important step toward developing government policy for organizational response strategies to big data breaches in the healthcare context. As big data breaches are a severe organizational threat, and almost inevitable for most healthcare companies, our research and the associated findings can guide communication plans and interventions that are essential to ensure smooth functioning of organizations in the critical context of healthcare.
    StatusFinished
    Effective start/end date1/01/2030/06/23

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