7 Essential Steps to Secure Healthcare Data from Rising Cyber Threats

At one point in your medical practice, you must have wondered how doctors in the 1990s and early 2000s collected and stored their patients’ health records.

Imagine you’re a new fellow in the 1990s, assigned to the Emergency Department (ED) of a hospital, and amidst the chaos of the ED, you’ll have to manually document the vital signs, symptoms, medical history, diagnoses, and prescriptions for each incoming patient on paper charts. For the registered patients, it involved an exhausting search through a heap of files.

Fast forward to today, whereby imputing a patient’s medical record number (a unique patient’s ID) or master patient record (for hospitals that have several facilities), you’re able to obtain and keep track of your patient’s medical progress.

This digitalization of a patient’s medical information is known as “health information technology”.

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Is Health Information Technology the future of healthcare?

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Health Information Technology (HIT) is simply any software, hardware, or system that aids the collection, storage, access, management, and recovery of a patient’s information.

One such technology is the use of electronic health and medical records (EHR/EMR), the digital equivalent of paper charts. It is predicted that in 2024, the global EHR market will reach 40 billion U.S. dollars.

Organizations like Caregiver, Inc., which provides support for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, converted 8 million paper records to their electronic health record system, thereby giving them more time to spend with their patients.

As a healthcare provider, using e-prescription software makes it easy to prescribe medications and share prescriptions with the pharmacy unit.

Today, any hospital or private clinic can easily manage its administrative affairs, including billing, patient appointments, and other day-to-day operations, through medical practice management software.

Tools such as the National Emergency Department Overcrowding Study (NEDOCS) and the Emergency Department Work Index (EDWIN) aid the management of overcrowding in the Emergency Department of a hospital.

Although the advantages of health information technology are vast for the patient and the health practitioner, we cannot reap their benefits if we do not take care of the security issues associated with them.

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Best Practices for a Safer Health-Tech Environment

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As a person in the medical profession, you know better than anyone else that it is better to prevent a disease than to be infected.

Any cyberattack on a health centre is like the Ebola virus, it threatens the lives of your patients and causes great instability in your finances.

You’re probably asking yourself: “If this is unavoidable, how can I protect my patients, employees, and myself from the radar of cyber criminals?”

1.?????? Cloud Security ?

When you invest in a computer security incident response team, you focus on health care and rest the burden of ICT protection on the expertise of professionals who will help reduce the vulnerabilities of cloud-based data services.

2.??? Patching vulnerabilities.

The best way to defend your hospital against external threats is through regular updates.

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Make it a priority to equip your IT security team with the resources to update software and address bugs.

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You gain security protection, protect your data from potential loss, improve productivity, and sustain your good reputation.

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3.?????? Vendor risk management

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Communicating with the security team of the vendors or manufacturers of your medical device helps you assess smart devices for security, especially AI-powered devices.

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Your vendor’s security team assist you in conducting security risk assessments of new devices and is especially handy during a digital attack.

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Constantly implement access controls for your clinical staff and vendor support staff.

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This procedure helps you limit the number of people who have access to sensitive information and also helps you monitor the vendor’s access to your system.

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4.??? Develop AI privacy policies

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Where your hospital permits the use of AI, you can’t downplay the risks associated with using volatile AI generative platforms in such a sensitive environment.

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For this reason, you should take active steps to develop and implement AI cybersecurity privacy and usage policies.

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Also, train your health and administrative personnel on how to apply these policies.

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5.??? Staff Digital Security Education

Educate your physicians and employees on basic cyber safety measures and steps to counter an incident of cyber invasion.

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The negligence of an internal staff can expose your establishment to a data breach.

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Organize staff training sessions that inform your staff on the nature of malware, phishing attacks, or ransomware. These lessons will also teach them the dangers associated with online infections, as well as the procedures for managing a cybersecurity situation.

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6.??? Routine data backup

As a healthcare organization that retains a considerable amount of information relating to a patient’s health, conducting routine backups of your electronic health records is paramount.

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It helps you avoid situations like diverting patients to other facilities while recovering from a system breach.

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A backup solution also saves you the trauma of halting patient care or abandoning patients who need attention because a ransomware attacker cut off your access to a patient’s medical records.

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It is not enough to just back up your electronic health records; such backed-up information must be updated regularly.

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7.??? Cybersecurity Incidence Response planning

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Plan and implement incident response procedures.

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This includes establishing a cyber threat information sharing program with other healthcare organizations.

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In the event of an infection, deploy your security incident response and reporting procedures.

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A call to Action for Healthcare Cybersecurity.

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Let’s wrap up with a piece of advice from John Riggi, a senior advisor for cybersecurity and risk for the American Hospital Association. Riggs urged stakeholders in the health sector “not to view cybersecurity as a purely technical issue falling solely under the domain of their IT departments. Rather, it’s critical to view cybersecurity as a patient safety, enterprise risk and strategic priority and instil it into the hospital’s existing enterprise, risk management, governance and business-continuity framework.”

He further pointed out that, “aligning cybersecurity and patient safety initiatives not only will help your organization protect patient safety and privacy but will also ensure continuity of effective delivery of high-quality care by mitigating disruptions that can have a negative impact on clinical outcomes.”

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