LTC providers wrestle with data security nightmares

CNA Financial is seeing more big long-term care facility liability insurance claims involving problems with health data security.

Analysts at the Chicago-based insurer talk about long-term care providers’ cyber liability problems in the company’s latest aging services claim report. The analysts based the report on a review of 2,617 large long-term care provider professional liability claims that closed between Jan. 1, 2011, and Dec. 31, 2015.

Screenwriters occasionally base movie plots on the idea of resourceful nursing home residents escaping from the homes and going on wild adventures.

In the new CNA report, analysts note that resident elopement continues to be a major risk both for the residents and for long-term care facility managers. For CNA, elopement has been the professional liability allegation with the highest severity. The average total paid is $325,561, in part because almost half of the elopment claims paid involved the death of the resident who escaped.

In one case, for example, a 77-year-old woman with dementia escaped from an assisted living facility. She drowned in a pond on the facility’s property.

Related: Jumbo liability claims hit continuing care communities

For the long-term care facility managers, data security is another growing, frustrating source of liability exposure.

Federal regulators are pushing the facilities to put more data in standardized electronic health record systems, and, at the same time, imposing stiff penalties and notification requirements on facilities that violate tough new data security requirements.

The CNA analysts found that cyber claims accounted for 206 of the 2,617 large, closed CNA liability claims they reviewed.