Increased Mobility and Working from Home

Thanks to increasingly sophisticated gadgets and connectivity, healthcare workers can do much of their work from home. While mobile technology can never replace face-to-face interaction with patients, “behind the scenes” work becomes increasingly mobile with each passing year. Bookkeeping, reporting, and customer service can all happen on the go. Unfortunately, this causes a lot of data security challenges and increases complexity. Cybersecurity threats and even laptop thefts are increasing in all sectors, and healthcare data is particularly profitable, which makes healthcare workers’ laptops and mobile devices coveted targets. A detailed work from home security policy is a must for healthcare organizations. Increased mobility also comes with increased cloud usage, another lead for data breach risks.

At-Risk Data Types

Thanks to the sheer amount of information that it stores, healthcare entities make easy targets for savvy data hackers. By hacking into a single entity, a hacker can gain an individual’s Social Security number, payment information, and everything else they’ll need for identity theft and other cybercrimes. As a result, healthcare data security requires more coverage and care than a lot of other information sources.

Internal Staff Errors

Healthcare organizations employ a lot of people, and those people can make healthcare data security mistakes. Whether it’s a lack of understanding the organization’s healthcare data security protocols, failure to grasp the full scope of the organization’s security needs, or simple human carelessness, employees can often put patient data at risk without realizing it. Maybe they use weak passwords to remember them more easily, or maybe they leave a laptop unattended. In any case, healthcare entities must prioritize organization-wide cybersecurity awareness to prevent such errors.

Hacking, Viruses, and Malware

Healthcare entities are susceptible to data breaches. If a healthcare network has multiple websites, for instance, hackers might create copycat sites that look identical to the real ones; these sites can be used to log sensitive data. Hackers may also take advantage of employee email addresses, using these addresses to employ phishing scams, malware, and other security dangers. Healthcare professionals receive more emails on average than most professionals receive. It’s not unusual for healthcare workers to receive emails from addresses that they don’t recognize. Thus, healthcare employees are more likely than others to open phishing emails.

COVID-19 and the Most Recent Healthcare Data Security Concerns

All security issues above existed in the healthcare industry long before the COVID-19 pandemic arrived. The pandemic has only made these concerns even more pressing as patients and providers adjusted their approach to healthcare. Andrew Steger explored some of these issues in the aforementioned HealthTech article. In the surge of “work from home” model, employees may have a higher risk of connecting to an unsecured public networks and putting themselves at risk of increased vulnerability to theft.
COVID-19 has also created a need for healthcare providers to collaborate with each other and with patients online. This increased cyber-collaboration can come with security-related vulnerabilities, especially when healthcare employees don’t have the right cybersecurity awareness training. The pandemic took the world by surprise, and because researchers are still learning about the virus, even healthcare providers have to learn and relearn best practices for conducting work during the pandemic. Few people, if any, could have foreseen the cybersecurity threats that would plague the healthcare industry as a result of this virus.