Healthcare organizations must balance keeping patient data safe with deploying innovative technologies like augmented reality, robotic health assistants, and telehealth. These advancements help providers map patients’ bodies for surgeries and monitor diabetics’ blood glucose levels.
But these advances also introduce new threats that may lead to data breaches and other cyberattacks. These attacks can come from outside or inside a healthcare facility.
Protecting Patient Data
Protecting patient data becomes increasingly important as healthcare diversifies into digital technology. Innovations such as 3-D mapping to facilitate surgical visualization, robotic hands for less invasive procedures and remote monitoring to detect blood sugar levels in diabetes patients all provide incredible advances for care but also introduce new security risks.
Many cybersecurity best practices in other industries can be applied to healthcare settings. For example, strong cybersecurity in healthcare allows encryption of all patient information devices—laptops, smartphones and portable USB drives—is essential. This prevents unauthorized access to sensitive data when the devices are lost or stolen.
Role-based access controls also help to limit the types of operations that can be performed on patient records. This includes flagging or blocking specific actions such as uploading to the web, unauthorized email sends, downloading to external drives and printing.
Encrypting Patient Data
Healthcare is a field where securing patient data takes precedence over almost everything else. It is life or death when information about laboratory tests, diseases and treatment plans gets into the wrong hands.
Encryption is a medical facility’s best tool to protect patients’ data. It converts plain text into code that only the facility’s computers can read. That way, even if hackers get their hands on the data, they won’t be able to decipher it or use it for illicit purposes.
To prevent unauthorized access, healthcare facilities should also create backups and use strong authentication methods, like passwords and PINs, cards or keys, and face or fingerprint recognition. Also, they should record any unauthorized actions with the data to detect a breach and take corrective measures quickly. In addition, healthcare organizations should offer regular cybersecurity training for all employees to help them develop a mindset of security awareness and vigilance.
Keeping Patient Data Secure
Mishandling patient data can have devastating consequences. It could lead to a cyberattack that de-anonymizes a patient’s medical history and diagnosis; it can be sold or used for commercial purposes; and, worst of all, it can impact a patient’s health care in unintended ways.
To protect patient data from being compromised, healthcare practices must take several steps. They must have robust logging processes that can identify unauthorized actions quickly and implement various security protection techniques such as encryption and encoding.
Practices must also back up their data to be recovered in case of a breach. Finally, they must encourage employees to use digital hygiene, including creating strong passwords and only using approved apps on their devices. This reduces the chance of a breach and prevents unauthorized access to confidential information from the devices themselves.
Keeping Employees’ Devices Secure
The security of employees’ devices and the data on those devices is essential to a healthcare organization. This includes personal phones, laptops and tablets.
Breaches on these devices can be extremely damaging. A hacker could infect an employee’s device with malware and spread it to others through the network. This can lead to various problems, including data loss and system shutdowns.
Furthermore, unauthorized access to an employee’s device can also allow hackers to learn their usernames and passwords, which can be particularly dangerous for healthcare organizations. This makes it important for security teams to have a zero-trust model to verify applications and services connecting to the healthcare network.
To prevent this from happening, healthcare organizations need to have policies in place and train employees on those policies. These policies outline which devices can be used and what applications should be downloaded. Additionally, healthcare organizations must perform ongoing risk assessments and respond immediately as new threats arise.
Keeping Employees’ Mobile Devices Secure
Whether your employees’ devices are company-issued or personal, protecting healthcare data on them is critical. Strict security controls should be put in place, including 2FA. This helps to prevent malware from accessing the device and compromising patient records. Regular backups should also be standard practice in case of accidental loss or theft of devices.
Medical devices that connect to hospital networks offer useful features, such as automation of tasks and improved communication among physicians caring for the same patients. However, they also present potential vulnerabilities for cyberattacks.
To limit the impact of a breach, your medical practice needs to have a robust recovery plan. This includes a backup network or cloud storage to ensure your business can operate even after a major attack.
Keeping Employees’ Laptops Secure
The data collected in medical research is invaluable, but the theft or exposure of sensitive patient information can prevent healthcare progress and jeopardize patients’ privacy. To avoid these issues, healthcare organizations should consider implementing cybersecurity best practices such as encrypting data at rest and in transit, securing mobile devices, running cyber audits, and ensuring that offsite backups are protected from ransomware attacks on the network.
In addition, security awareness training teaches employees to recognize techniques that cybercriminals use to breach networks and plant ransomware. It also helps them to understand the importance of avoiding phishing scams and clicking on suspicious links and emails.
Unfortunately, although several studies suggest that effective health privacy protections improve people’s confidence that their medical records will remain private, data breaches still occur. One survey found that 27 percent of people believe their healthcare provider released their personal information without consent. All institutions conducting health research must take steps to strengthen data security.
