Combating Healthcare Hacking and Data Privacy Issues: 7 Steps to Greater Security

In a previous post, we discussed data security vulnerabilities faced by healthcare brands. Despite the growing number of cybersecurity solutions, the persistent rate of healthcare breaches has not slowed significantly. Healthcare data – especially patient data – is an extremely valuable commodity for cyber criminals.

In May, the HIPAA Journal reported data breaches occurred at a rate of more than once per day in the month of April. While there was a reduction in the number of actual breached healthcare records from the previous month, the twelve-month period prior to April saw almost 40 million records compromised.

In another report, Verizon found that in 2019 there were 798 security incidents and 521 confirmed data breaches in the healthcare sector. Clearly, data protection still remains a significant challenge for healthcare brands.

As a result of increasing regulatory requirements for data protection, healthcare organizations are responding by implementing healthcare security best practices to lower their risk of suffering costly data breaches. Security experts agree that it is imperative that brands take steps to ensure critical healthcare data is effectively protected, secured, and managed in a HIPAA-compliant manner. But operationally, data must be easily accessible to healthcare professionals (HCPs) around the world so they can deliver better patient outcomes while maximizing your product benefits.

So, what steps should your healthcare brand take to secure sensitive data while allowing access to HCPs worldwide?

Steps to improve data security

Despite the continued threats to electronic health records and other sensitive healthcare data, there are ways to build a better cybersecurity infrastructure. Some of the key recommendations from security experts in the field include:

1. Analyze your risks. First, assess the risks that your organization faces. Look at risks around your end-user activities and data management policies then assess risk levels for all of your applications, back- and front-end systems, integrations of remote locations, and so on. What risks exist around mobile connections? External partners? The best place to start a vigorous data security program is to understand where your vulnerabilities lie.

2. Create a cybersecurity culture. Next you should create a culture of knowledge around cybersecurity, which should include marketing and sales teams. Train employees on cybersecurity best practices. Focus their attention on their critical role as data gatekeepers by helping them understand the risks, consequences, and preventative measures around cyberattacks.
3. Have a disaster recovery plan. Proper data backup is an essential component to a data security policy. With the rise in ransomware attacks on healthcare organizations, brands should have adequate restore points and offsite data backup storage in place. Have a clear disaster recovery process available that is accessible to key stakeholders in the event of a breach.
4. Install and update the latest security tools and patches. Ensure that your antivirus protection, firewalls, system maintenance, and digital signature software are up to date and checking for the latest threats to your organization’s cybersecurity. Healthcare brands should be deploying identity verification protocols, tamper-evident technology, and a comprehensive audit trail to review the handling and sharing of sensitive data.
5. Secure your email system. Often cyberattacks come from hazardous email messages containing ransomware or phishing attacks. So it is important to prove out your email security architecture and install solutions that go beyond traditional gateway security.
6. Strengthen data access and usage controls. Use access controls that restrict access to information and applications to only those users who require access to perform their jobs and can provide authentication, notably through multi-factor authentication. In addition, brands should use data usage controls to block specific actions involving sensitive data, such as copying to external drives, printing, web uploads, or unauthorized email sends.
7. Test for vulnerabilities. Routine testing is required no matter how strong your systems vendors claim their products are. Checking for unpatched gear, running active penetration testing, or scanning for rogue software helps to catch issues before they become exploitable. There is no commonly prescribed time to conduct these tests, though security experts recommend a weekly test or at least a monthly testing protocol.

With these steps in place, your healthcare brand should be better protected now and in the future.

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Article Written by: Alex Brown