Healthcare - The Road Ahead for Patient Record Protection

IT security has finally become a more central and critical priority among health care leaders in the past few years, and this could not have come soon enough given the immense volumes of records exposed of late. Identity theft has been the most damaging economic crime in the United States and many nations abroad for a while now, and this is largely the result of companies struggling to adequately protect their systems and storage environments from a range of threats.

In the near future, healthcare firms will need to be creative and forward-thinking in their IT security strategies, working to catch up and get ahead of the progression of threats rather than remaining in a precarious position behind the proverbial eight ball. With the right combination of management structures to handle people, processes and technologies, along with plenty of defensive tools like secure cloud and email encryption services, risk mitigation might be a bit more seamless down the road.

A key suggestion
Healthcare Informatics recently argued that medical firms that achieve a proactive ebb and flow of security management will tend to be more successful in their efforts to protect systems and data. This has been a relatively common thread among experts and analysts who focus on security, as too many companies fail to plan for the future in their strategies, and this will eventually lead to more significant data loss events down the road.

The source argued that techniques leveraged by threats are getting more advanced, while employees who are tasked with protecting information are not receiving the training necessary to avoid even simplistic attacks.

"In the hospital space, even with education, with the volume of emails that you get and all of the activity that you have to do in terms of responding to everything, people aren't spending time to really see how legitimate something is," Alexander Grijalva of the New York University Langone Medical Center told the news provider.

Agility is crucial
One of the best ways to stay ahead of the wave of data breach threats is to strive toward agile processes and strategies. This makes it a bit easier to make adjustments on a dime and plan for the future, while managed service providers can often assist in the creation of these strategies and the execution of each component therein.