Seventy percent of healthcare professionals are "very" or "extremely" confident in their knowledge of where their firm's data resides, according to the Integris survey of execs and IT decision makers US healthcare organizations.

Yet 50 percent of them update their inventory of personal data once a year or less; and a mere 17 percent of respondents are able to access sensitive data across five common data source types.

Healthcare leaders' heightened confidence in data management comes as a surprise amid a growing cybersecurity crisis: 60 percent of healthcare leaders — who are bound to more data-sharing agreements than pros from other industries — are only "somewhat confident" or "not so confident" their external partners' use of data is in compliance with their sharing agreements.

Data privacy impacts much more than regulatory compliance:

• Proving compliance with business obligations like data sharing agreements was cited by 67 percent of respondents.
• Enforcing internal data handling policies like classification and retention was cited 61 percent of the time.
• 28 percent of respondents cited the impact on M&A due diligence and the delivery of AI / ML projects (22 percent).
• 35 percent saw privacy concerns impacting data lake hygiene .

More key findings include:

• 50 percent of respondents had 50 or more of data sharing agreements in place (20 percent more than the entire set of respondents).
• Respondents reported being 61 percent more confident in their ability to be compliant compared to how they perceived their partners.
• 52 percent of data privacy budgets are concentrated in IT departments.