Healthcare sector accounts for 30% The world’s data, and its footprint is growing every day. Such abundance of data is both a blessing and a curse. It allows for data-driven decision-making within an organization and enables practitioners to make forward-looking decisions about patient care. But it also makes healthcare companies a prime target for hackers, as the industry is notoriously behind in adopting security processes. Nearly 50 million people in the U.S. have sensitive health data in 2021 violation.
Patients need to be confident that their most sensitive personal data, including names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and health records, will remain private and secure. Organizations need to comply with data privacy regulations and maintain their reputation. But completely restricting access to data is not the solution. Decision makers need data insights to optimize operations and drive innovation.
Protecting patient privacy while allowing access to data is a delicate balancing act. The right approach, combined with modern data access technologies, can help healthcare leaders overcome security challenges, better protect sensitive patient data, maintain compliance, and leverage data for decision-making.
Healthcare’s Data Security Challenges and Notable Hacks
The pandemic has created a rapid digital transformation for the healthcare industry. As a result, healthcare providers are now more data-driven than ever, with clinical and patient data at their fingertips. But staying on top of cybersecurity in this cloud-first world is a challenge. Cyber attacks are relentless, and criminals are exploiting vulnerabilities across the healthcare supply chain.
Even before Covid-19, the industry was feeling the pain.National Anthem Blue Cross Breakthrough 2015 is the largest healthcare breach to date. Nearly 80 million patient records containing sensitive data were stolen, ultimately costing the company nearly $40 million in settlement costs. Just six weeks later, Premera Blue Cross discovered a breach affecting more than 10 million members, making it the second-largest attack in healthcare history and costing a $74 million settlement. The two attacks helped cement 2015 as a record-breaking year for medical data breaches.
Historic 2015 aside, healthcare data breaches are trending up. hacker attack Increase an increase of 3,000% from 2011 to 2021, accounting for 75% Of all the data breaches in the healthcare sector last year, widespread damage was caused, including lost and compromised medical records, regulatory fines and financial losses, identity theft, lawsuits, and loss of patient trust.six of them Top 25 Healthcare Data Breaches Over the past year, over 40 million patient records were exposed, including 3.5 million in Florida Healthy Kids Incidents, 3.2 million in the 20/20 Eye Care Network, and 2.6 million in AccuDoc Solutions exposed.
Why is healthcare so the best option for cybercriminals? this is very simple. Healthcare companies have huge databases containing detailed personal health information (PHI). Today, this sensitive data can be accessed by more people and in more ways, and is often protected by legacy, easy-to-break systems with barebones IT and security teams, if any.
When healthcare breaches do occur, they are not caught as quickly as financial breaches—sometimes undetected for months, or even scarier, not caught at all. This provides an ideal environment for bad actors to hack into electronic PHI and electronic medical records (EMRs), access data such as names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers, and sell them on the dark web or demand a ransom for a safe return.
Four steps to better protect patient data
With cyberattacks steadily rising, something needs to be done to avoid a similar fate and prioritize patient trust. There are four key best practices that, with proper data access technology, can protect healthcare companies from hackers and attacks:
1. Discover, understand, and label data. Healthcare organizations manage large volumes of sensitive patient data, often spread across many locations. Protecting this data and maintaining compliance can be a challenge without knowing where this data is located.
Data discovery is the foundation of any data access and security strategy, as organizations must understand and locate their most sensitive data before it can protect it. With the right tools, data and security teams can build accurate data inventories without the need for expensive scans that can slow down infrastructure, and then sensitive data can be identified, classified, and organized according to organizational risk and value. The inventory provides real-time visibility into who is accessing sensitive information.
2. Define and enforce sensitive data policies. Controlling access to sensitive data is a key element of any data security strategy. Granular security policies including dynamic masking, row-level security, and role and attribute-based access control (ABAC) can be integrated into access control policies without requiring IT resources. Applying a universal block is a great way to maintain instant security—for example, always block all but the last four digits of your Social Security number or hide your home address. This masking of sensitive data at query runtime can be based on preferred security policy and identity, data location or data type, and supports compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, and other regulatory requirements.
Multi-factor authentication should be placed on top of access controls to further authenticate users before granting access. It is also important that there are controls in place to prevent users from manipulating classification levels – only authorized users can make these changes.
3. Make data easily accessible (but only to the right people). All data should not have free access, but neither should it be subject to strict locks and keys. Healthcare leaders need to establish secure data access policies that begin by categorizing data users by risk level and reviewing them before granting access. Solutions with automated, self-service access facilitate requests and approvals without adding any code or modifying workflows, so analysts and data scientists can quickly and securely access the data they need without manual requests.
As Arun Buduri, vice president of engineering, IT and CISO at Innovaccer, shared recently during a healthcare roundtable at the company’s Data Leadership Summit: “It’s all about getting back to basics. People who shouldn’t have access to data shouldn’t have access to it. It’s that simple.” [Editor’s Note: Innovaccer is a customer of the author’s employer]
4. Seamless compliance. Healthcare organizations must ensure that their data access policies comply with privacy laws, such as HIPAA and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), to avoid costly breaches (HIPAA breaches may cost up to $1.5 million per year). Real-time visibility into data usage and an audit trail of when, who, and why sensitive data was accessed will help healthcare companies meet regulatory compliance requirements and fine-tune future security and data access practices. Tools that continuously audit and monitor data access, queries and results and can create automated reports are preferred.
Common data access tools continuously discover all data in use, automate security and access controls, and provide auditing and reporting. With this modern approach to healthcare data access, the industry can prevent data breaches and maintain patient privacy, while still allowing healthcare leaders to glean insights from data to provide better patient care and improve business operations.
Photo: roshi11, Getty Images
