How to Prevent Data Breach In Healthcare Organizations

How to Prevent Data Breach in Healthcare Organizations

Data breach can be devastating. Even data conversion services must be chosen carefully.

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Healthcare cyber security threats continue to evolve and with cases of ransomware infiltrating provider network, patient data security and patient safety could be at risk.

Therefore it is important for healthcare organizations to protect their data. Healthcare units store and process multiple kinds of data ranging from images and emails to medical records and payment information. With the help of data conversion services, this healthcare data that is subject to HIPAA compliance or other privacy mandates, is converted to digital format and stored on multiple devices. Users can immediately access data across a range of devices and applications.

Healthcare organizations deal with huge volumes of sensitive data that requires strict data security to avoid data beach. However, healthcare is a sector that faces persistent threat of data breach. As per reports, the healthcare industry had the highest cost of a data breach for the 9th consecutive year, costing organizations around US$6.5 million on average, over 60 percent higher than other industries. According to Dizzion,89% of healthcare organizations experienced a data breach in the past two years. Despite the sophisticated measures put in place by providers, data breaches are still common.

As per HIPAA Journal, 2019 April marks the highest monthly tally since federal authorities started publishing breach statistics more than a decade ago. 55% of healthcare companies in the United States faced cyber attacks. Almost one-fifth confirmed that they had been attacked in the last 12 months. According to Herjavec Group Healthcare Report, ransomware attacks on the healthcare sector will quadruple by 2020. Another study from HIMSS and Symantec revealed that 75 percent of healthcare organizations invest only 6 percent or less of their IT budget for data security.

From the above statistics and figures we understand that it is high time for the healthcare industry to make stringent regulations to prevent data threats. 

Develop a solid plan to fight data breach: While the ever rising cost and budgetary challenges put healthcare professionals under tremendous pressure, healthcare organizations must consider a good plan that can prevent any type of data breach. So, the first step is to write down a formal plan and disseminated among leadership teams and IT staff, and reviewed regularly to make sure action points are up to date and consider various potential issues. As per IBM Security and Ponemon Institute, around 15 percent of healthcare organizations have implemented security automation technologies. Companies with an incident response team who also extensively tested their incident response plan experienced US$1.23 million less in data breach costs on average than those that had neither measure in place. Over the past years 11 billion records leaked in data breaches. Therefore companies are facing rising scrutiny from regulators and

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consumers and will likely face mounting cost, brand damage and regulation consequently. 

Good cloud architecture for quick data migration: Healthcare organizations are focusing on data migration to the cloud to support accessibility and scalability.

Migrating data to the cloud is challenging but it helps to keep data safe. But before migrating make sure that the application architecture is reviewed and recognize the required architecture for leveraging infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

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Use of modern security tools: Mobiledevices have become inevitable in our lives and have emerged as an influential solution that helps healthcare professionals access patient records at any time. As per a survey of practitioners, decisionmakers expect that 97% of bedside nurses and 98% of physicians will utilize mobile devices in their work by 2022. Artificial Intelligence also helps healthcare organizations to work efficiently at a lower cost. Moreover, AI and robotics in healthcare is huge and are progressively becoming a crucial part of the healthcare system.AI in the healthcare market is expected to reach US$27.6 billion through 2025.

The only way to ensure healthcare data security is to limit access to critical data, educate healthcare professionals about handling patient records and above all adopt stringent rules in the healthcare organization that everyone must follow. Another important thing is to partner with a professional document scanning service to convert all data into digital format to avoid mishandling of data and prevent data threat.

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(800) 670 2809