Last year, 78% of healthcare providers reported a Malware or Ransomware attack. These attacks left many sensitive patient records vulnerable and open to the world. In an effort to prevent these types of attacks from happening, stricter compliances were enforced, particularly for HIPAA compliant encryption.
If you’re not familiar with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), it is a US legislation which ensures that data privacy and data security provisions are available to healthcare providers to protect medical and patient information.
There are various ways that healthcare providers can find continuous data protection from HIPAA compliant encryption and strategies. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) enforces limited facility access and access control across physical sites, as well as consistent policies enforced among authorized personnel.
As for computers and devices themselves, HIPAA compliance is also looking to enforce that unique user IDs, emergency access procedures, automatic log off, encryption, and audit reports or tracking logs of all activity on hardware and software.
This may sound very intimidating, but the great news is that it’s easy to implement, manage, and monitor. Tools like RollBack Rx ensure that organizations are fully compliant with HIPAA in terms of data protection and access control.
Many Healthcare organizations have common security solutions deployed to assist in protecting machines, like Firewalls and Antivirus programs. As we’ve discussed in the past, this is not always sufficient to protect your machines or even be fully HIPAA compliant.
Through the well-planned deployment and implementation of proper data protection strategies and solutions, organizations in the Healthcare field can ensure that not only are they HIPAA compliant, but ultimately mindful of the need for privacy and security in a modern digital age.