Healthcare IT Security

The Challenges of Healthcare IT Security

Healthcare IT Security is medicine’s next big challenge. The core mission of healthcare is to ensure that patients are healthy, safe, and well cared for. Traditionally, healthcare has focused on the physical dimensions of medicine – healing wounds, combatting illnesses, and performing operations. Increasingly, however, the safety of personal health information (PHI) has become a key component of the quality, and mission, of modern medicine.

New IT Security measures are required to secure personal health information in the digital age. Now, healthcare institutions have to defend patients against cyber threats, as well as bacterial ones. Hackers, phishers, and fraudsters place high value on PHI records, and seek them out with gusto. Healthcare IT security measures have to be more forceful, and more powerful, than these hackers’ efforts, in order for healthcare institutions to ensure their patients’ safety. Healthcare security is no longer just physical – it’s virtual, too. And, as more of the world’s medical data transitions into digital forms, Healthcare IT Security will only become more important.

Regulatory Roadblocks for productive Healthcare IT Security

Government regulations underpin the new IT security responsibilities of care facilities in the US. HIPAA and HITECH laws require care facilities to safeguard PHI, and ensure strict privacy measures for the meaningful use of PHI when coordinating care. These regulations insist on long, frequently changing passwords, multi-step authentication measures, and strict access control systems. These measures, though necessary, and desirable, create technical roadblocks for care providers. Endlessly entering passwords creates a huge inefficiency problem: time is wasted on safeguarding patient information – time that could be better spent on safeguarding patients themselves. Ideally, healthcare IT Security should allow care providers to ensure the safety of their patients, and their patients’ information. In reality, this balance is hard to strike: much of the time provider efficiency is sacrificed to strict regulatory procedures. Imprivata offers solutions to rebalance the equation of care, and IT security: we improve provider productivity for better focus on patient care.