Tag Archives: Healthcare

The Intersection of Cost, Safety, And Experience

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Until recently, healthcare providers and hospitals have implemented new technology as an afterthought—an easy mistake when the sensitive nature of the industry demands constant attention. Now, new compliance rules and cyber attacks have forced these organizations to reconsider the way data is managed and exchanged. Some third-party companies have seen the chance to move into a space with numerous opportunities. In particular, the ever-changing nature of compliance law has thrown some of the shortcomings of the industry into sharp relief. In addition, the patient engagement movement has created new reasons for healthcare organizations to invest in technology.

 

Getting Involved

Patient portals have existed for some time, to the point that it’s worth it for many organizations to reevaluate whether theirs work the way they’re supposed to. Portals are intended to be a convenient way for patients to get their critical health information outside of the doctor’s office, but their implementation is flawed.

 

In the effort to create a personalized space for patients, portals are often seen as an extent of frustrating medical red tape—including generic instructions, unhelpful information, and difficulty of access. Additionally, they provide yet another potential attack surface that care providers must manage to prevent any sort of breach.

 

The solution may be to consider more mobile patient tools to allow for easy access. The fewer barriers to entry there are for patients, the more likely they are to make use of the information. Whatever the solution, there is a strong need for technology companies to step in and build these tools in a way that is compliant and user-friendly.

 

Less Is More

While many risk-averse healthcare organizations may balk at completely changing their infrastructure to adapt to changing times, the benefits are significant. Even beyond improved security, adopting tactics such as moving patient information into the cloud can actually help create a better environment for patients. Changing infrastructure is an opportunity to update existing apps and portals.

 

These tools allow for easier exchange of data, empowering patients to interact with providers without having to go into a hospital. In turn, these organizations can gather valuable data that can enhance their experience further. The modern patient wants to shop around and compare options, and easing this process can cause them to favorably view one organization over another.

 

Infrastructure Is King

Given the nervousness felt by many organizations at the prospect of updating decades-old systems, it’s always worth emphasizing that they don’t have to do it themselves. Making connections between healthcare organizations and IaaS companies is important—bringing in an expert is better than skimping every time. Infrastructure is important for interactions with both patients and other retailers—given the amount of other organizations that the average healthcare provider will interact with, it pays to have a system that works correctly. Digital transformation is a process, but there’s a misconception that in-house IT has to do all of the heavy lifting. In reality, finding an infrastructure plan adapted specifically to an organization is the best way to move forward.

 

More Than Just Security

The modern healthcare organization is starting to realize the myriad benefits of updating systems. While data security is still one of the big drives for change, the benefits to patients and providers alike cannot be overstated. It’s up to these groups to take a step forward—or run the risk of being left behind.

 

Is the Cloud the Safest Solution for Security?

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Ever since the ransomware attack of WannaCry attacked more than 230,000 across the world, the healthcare industry’s concern over cybersecurity has risen. Although there were no patients harmed in the attack and no data compromised or stolen, there became a serious need for healthcare organizations to strengthen their security. One of the most considered options is to migrate the information to the cloud so it won’t get into the wrong hands again.

Security of the Cloud
Could moving information to the cloud be more secure? It is almost impossible to recover data has been encrypted by a ransomware which makes preventing it from being stolen in the first place so important. Keeping secure data on the cloud would be the best way to keep it backed up instead of on-premises. In the perfect situation, there would be enough warning to isolate a ransomware infection and recover important data. Until then, backing up data on the cloud is an ideal solution.

DRaaS as Prevention
After the attack of WannaCry, the public’s biggest concern was the amount of damage caused by the downtime. A simple backup can restore a production database, but a DRaaS solution will be much faster. This is simply because DR is a system of replication that combines software and the cloud. This system is designed to lower downtime in a data breach and get organizations back on their feet and running in no time. By providing third-party support and geographic diversity, DRaaS gives healthcare organizations better security than secondary sites.

Healthcare Industries’ Opinion
Due to the threats of cybersecurity and hackers attacking healthcare organizations, the industry knows something must be done. The organizations have recognized that using the cloud to strengthen security is the best option. The cloud can be used to manage threats, isolate incidents and backup important data. Most recently, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Jeremy Hunt, was the first to sign off on an official guide to help the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) move to the cloud.

Although moving the cloud is favored by most, there are a few concerned about compliance. Many IT Departments in healthcare do not have the correct roles or expertise to implement the cloud into their security. But there are organizations to help those in the health industry to help utilize the cloud in their security. It’s imperative that the health organizations use the cloud technology to beef up their security and take strong measures against cybercriminals.

How Healthcare Can Adapt to Cyber Threats

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As the healthcare advances in technology, cybersecurity threats rise. Cybercriminals are becoming increasingly more creative with their hacks, making the need to up security direr. With the rise of security incidents such as WannaCry or the proliferation of cryptocurrency coin miners, there is a growing risk of disrupting the delivery of healthcare. The healthcare industry must now adapt to a more comprehensive and security-centric strategy. There are a number of ways the industry is planning on advancing their security:

How Cybercriminals Attack
Cybercriminals have become quite crafty with how the attack the healthcare system. One of the new and most popular ways is exploiting the software supply chain. Since the health industry heavily relies on a network of partners, attackers will choose a supply-chain-based attack to breach an organization or to get to one of their suppliers.

This kind of attack can take up to three forms: hijacking a supplier’s domain to direct traffic to an infected domain, directly compromising the software of a supplier, or targeting any third-party hosting services. The healthcare industry is at high risk for these kinds of cyber attacks because of how much they use third-party partners and services.

The Latest Industry Breach Trends
Security breaches that involve data of more than 500 people are the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). By posting their findings of each breach on the HHS OCR Breach Portal, they provide data that can be analyzed to find the latest cyber security trends in the healthcare industry. Analyzing this data found that the number of breaches in the industry rose 10 percent within the last year. As the number of breaches is increasing, the healthcare industry’s security approach is beginning to change.

A study by HHS Analytics found that 40 percent of healthcare organizations cybersecurity is a scheduled item of discussion among the boardroom. The HHS also reported that the three biggest figures holding health organizations back from reaching a higher level of cybersecurity back were budget, staffing and skill set. The healthcare industry understands that the cybersecurity concerns are high and are in need of a stronger security program that is more broadly focused and go beyond HIPAA compliance.

Best Security for Healthcare
With so many cybersecurity threats for the healthcare industry, there is a desperate need for protection against hackers. Healthcare industries and organizations stand a chance against these cybercriminals by seeing cybersecurity as a business risk, address it regularly at a board level, hire qualified employees for new security roles or even consider the security implications when purchasing equipment. By incorporating these security measures, industries have a better chance against cyber attackers and hackers.

Considerations For Healthcare in the Cloud

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Healthcare organizations are in the midst of a massive transition, updating decades-old systems to fall into line with compliance and reconsidering the way they manage, store, and exchange data. This mass migration often includes moving infrastructure to the cloud and redoing EHR systems.

Cloud computing is sometimes looked on with suspicion by healthcare professionals, especially after several very public breaches in recent months. However, new HIPAA rules governing cloud services and patient privacy have made it easier for organizations to transition with confidence.

Even with this improved definition and numerous available cloud services, there are pitfalls that may be faced in the transition period, especially as companies learn and grow. I’ve listed some of the considerations that any organization should keep in mind when migrating and looking to gain more agility through the cloud.

Know Your Service

Before committing to migration to AWS, Azure, or another cloud platform, know what these IaaS providers will be giving your organization. Establishing a good service agreement requires an intimate knowledge of your organization’s needs. Consider which applications and functions are the most essential to your cloud services and build out your priorities from there. Finally, keep in mind that your needs may change over time. A periodic update of what matters from your cloud services will keep your business poised to get the most out of the service you are paying for.

Know Your Security

One of the biggest sticking points when transitioning to the cloud in a healthcare environment is security of personal data. It is easy to design a cloud infrastructure that fulfills your needs while also being very secure, but this does take some level of planning beforehand. These cloud providers may very well have specialized compliance plans in place for healthcare organizations, so ask about both your options and how they have served similar groups in the past. They may even have experts able to walk you through the migration process in as safe and expedient of a manner as possible.

Know Your Price

Total cost of ownership (TCO) can be surprisingly high for some subscription-based services, and knowing the financial burden of migrating to the cloud is as valuable as knowing security risks and the like. Design is huge here, and as with my first point, any organization looking to adopt a cloud infrastructure will need to be carefully audited to ensure that there are no excess costs. Scalability is also important, and a good cloud design allows for an organization to add more or dial back as needed.

Know Your Performance

Your network is defined not only by how data is stored, but by how quickly it can be moved and retrieved. Slow networks can be frustrating at best, and in a healthcare environment, can even risk lives. Consider both application structure and the location of the data when designing a cloud environment to maximize performance. Ensure that key applications and workloads receive priority. Fortunately, good architecture is easy to implement into the overall structure of the cloud.

EHRs and Compliance

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Managing electronic health records, or EHRs, in a digital ecosystem takes some level of caution, given the high value of the personal information. Healthcare organizations have struggled when it comes to providing patients with their EHRs in a compliant manner. Many of these issues stem from the patients’ lack of knowledge about how to properly access these records.

As per HIPAA privacy rules, organizations are required to provide EHRs to patients upon request. In these instances, they are allowed to have them sent to a person or entity of their choosing after paying a reasonable fee.

The “reasonable” part of this requirement has been called into contention, with a patient advocacy organization reporting some patients paying hundreds of dollars for their medical records. In two instances, patients were charged a subscription fee by the organization to access medical records.

After the release of these findings, medical organizations defended the costs associated with EHR distribution. Retrieving medical records can be a surprisingly extensive process, with information pulled from multiple EHR systems, resulting in a document that can be hundreds of pages long and filled with minutiae. Additionally, much of this often needs to be trimmed to ensure that the information is only relevant to the patient the records are being distributed to.

Add in security concerns for the transfer of data, especially when requesting it from a third party, and it’s easy to see why it has proven difficult for many healthcare organizations. In several states, fees for third party requests are generally higher than those charged to patients. This is because fees for third party requests at the behest of a patient are not covered under HIPAA regulation.

Laws differ from state to state, making it important for organizations to understand how their laws determine charges for EHRs. For instance, Kentucky entitles individuals to a single free copy of their medical records.

Additional difficulty in handling EHRs is a result of inadequate patient education regarding ways to access records. Educating them on the subject is less an IT concern and more a question of how patient engagement can be leveraged to promote HIPAA compliance. New forms for both healthcare organizations and patients released by AHIMA have aimed to improve understanding of these processes.

Even just making patients aware that they have the right to access their health information is an important step toward compliance. The form was made with the intention of it being flexible across organizations, allowing them to adapt it for their needs and patients.

As more and more healthcare providers update their EHR systems in the coming years, expect to see improvements in the ways that information is both delivered and made apparent to patients. Tools that improve patient access and are HIPAA-compliant are sure to be in demand as organizations work to do away with their antiquated and unwieldy paper records.