When considering the records of care across different patients, it’s important to consider the best ways to keep that information as secure as possible. Internationally, there are some important laws and regulations that stipulate just how private and confidential that data should be, and it’s vital to comply with those laws.
Here, let’s discuss some of the main challenges that the healthcare sector faces in terms of keeping patient records as secure as possible.
Access Control
The main way that modern healthcare institutions can ensure that their data is as secure as possible is through access control. Essentially, this is a cybersecurity approach to data storage, with only certain people being allowed to access certain elements of data – and only the data relevant to them.
This is important as it allows for different tiers of care to have access to different levels of data commensurate with the data that they need. For example, a doctor may need data from several different tests on several parts of the body to ensure they make an accurate diagnosis. An admin assistant, however, will only need to know the dates and locations of appointments to ensure they can fit someone into their schedule.
This is one of the first hurdles in newer healthcare roles, such as jobs for medical scribes. It can be tough to understand what data a new role requires access to, though thankfully not impossible. With a little critical thinking, it’s easy to understand the interactions that a given professional or paraprofessional will need with the system they’re using.
Data Breaches
Data breaches are a big issue in the healthcare sector. One of the main reasons for this is very simple: the healthcare sector stores a lot of data! From information about patient health and well-being to insecure and out-of-date devices that a hospital may have to use, there are several data points that could potentially leak from the system.
The average cost of a healthcare data breach in the sector was $9.6 million in 2021. Therefore, it’s clearly an important issue to deal with preventatively. As such, the main goal of tactics to deal with data breaches is to teach employees and patients how to avoid giving out access to their data overall. With a little learning, a lot of progress can be made. Truly, this is a case where ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ rings true.
Employee Training
As detailed above, additional training and learning carried out by employees can allow them to create a much more secure and helpful environment for healthcare to take place. Generally speaking, these forms of training can take two formats: data interactions and data management.
Data Interactions
Data interactions are best described as the times at which a professional is dealing with a computer or similar system that may allow them to access confidential data. This may be during a time when they are booking an appointment for a patient, or reading up on their medical history in order to form a more complete medical opinion.
The danger of these interactive periods is that they pose a physical lack of security. If the professional physically gets up and walks away from their computer, then the data concerned is not secure. In theory, a bad actor could approach that terminal and download a large volume of data without any issue.
Training employees to lock and password-protect their machines and data is vital. This is often seen, nowadays, with physical keycards being needed to interact with a given machine. Often, data can only be accessed by physically sliding a card into the machine and logging in that way. Removing the card will simply revoke access to the data.
Data Management
The concept of data management has come quite a long way since the days when people had to heft large boxes of papers and files around a storage room. However, while the roles have changed, security is still a concern.
A primary concern in data management terms is insecure connections, especially as increasing numbers of people continue to want to work from home. A hospital’s connection can be secured, but some education is needed to allow an individual to secure their home network in quite an effective way.
There are many challenges in maintaining and securing patient data throughout the healthcare system, from bad actors carrying out data leaks to physical insecurities leading to unauthorized data access. However, through a combination of education and proactive problem-solving, it’s possible to ensure that all relevant data is kept secure.
