How Healthcare Organisations Can Deploy Data Security More Holistically
The hardest part about securing sensitive healthcare data is continuously knowing where sensitive data resides and who has access to it. This creates data security and compliance challenges – especially when healthcare data is constantly shared and moved between teams and departments.
This has become an even bigger problem in the wake of increasing third-party data breaches. According to a recent report, 35% of all third-party breaches in 2023 affected healthcare organizations, more than any other sector. Hospitals and healthcare companies are typically connected across a broad ecosystem, and an attack on one organization’s system can have a snowball effect; this is exactly what we saw happen with the UnitedHealth/Change Healthcare and Ascension breaches.
While necessary, this reliance on a complex network of third-party vendors, including medical supply companies, software providers, and contractors, introduces new potential vulnerabilities with each link.
What Makes Healthcare Data so Attractive?
Large healthcare organizations are widely influential and impact the lives of millions of people, so the repercussions of a data breach are catastrophic. That’s because these breaches impact not only patients but hospitals and insurers, too –– consequently slowing the vital care and services of healthcare providers. The constant movement and sharing of cloud-based healthcare data puts pressure on IT and security teams to understand where all of their sensitive patient data lives, who has access to it, whether there are excessive permissions, and how it’s being protected.
What makes the industry such an attractive target to cybercriminals is that providers hold vast amounts of patient historical and new medical data. Naturally, this data is extremely sensitive and valuable. Medical records are between 4 to 20 times more valuable to cyber attackers than other personally identifiable information (PII), such as credit cards and Social Security numbers. In the context of third-party risks, malicious actors are able to infiltrate a healthcare supply chain ecosystem in a number of ways. Not all third-party vendors maintain the same level of comprehensive security measures as healthcare providers do. Smaller vendors often lack the resources to implement strong cybersecurity protocols, making these organizations easier access points for attackers.
The prevalent use of outdated legacy systems by healthcare organizations and their vendors creates gaps in their security posture through unpatched vulnerabilities, weak access control mechanisms, and unsophisticated authentication requirements.
As protected health information (PHI) and other types of patient data have been digitized and so frequently accessed, shared, and copied across multiple systems, the risk of interception or unauthorized access is heightened.
Staying Compliant with Strict Healthcare Cybersecurity Regulations
In an industry wrought with personal and sensitive data, it is imperative that organizations stay on top of strict data privacy regulations. This, of course, adds another layer of complexity to managing healthcare data.
For example, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have become the new standard system of logging and storing patient information, and this proliferation of digitally stored data is making compliance management increasingly challenging. The healthcare sector’s stringent regulations require regular risk assessments and adherence to administrative, physical, and technical safeguards for electronic PHI.
This national standard to protect sensitive patient information means compliance is dependant on data security measures. As the healthcare industry continues to embrace technological advancements, these organizations must strike a delicate balance between innovation and security to navigate the evolving landscape of healthcare cybersecurity and defend against threat actors.
Embracing a Holistic Data-Centric Approach
To do this, healthcare organizations should turn to solutions that help them establish holistic security approaches that provide full visibility into protecting patient information and other sensitive assets.
Adopting comprehensive data security measures that scan, discover, and classify sensitive information can ensure patient data is secure, stored correctly, and remains compliant. Moreover, healthcare organizations can further boost their abilities to proactively safeguard sensitive healthcare data and ensure regulatory compliance by implementing data security technology with Generative AI (Gen AI).
GenAI-powered data security solutions can help strengthen defences against third-party threats. Specifically, AI/ML-based analysis and large language model (LLM) engines can serve as valuable tools to further reinforce essential data security practises. These include providing advanced risk assessment and contextual insights about data exposures, streamlining data tracking processes, accurately detecting non-compliance risks, and automating time-consuming tasks like data discovery and classification.
By discovering and classifying electronic PHI, healthcare providers can understand who has access to it, where it lives, and implement monitoring and tracking capabilities to help achieve least privilege access. This ensures each user has the appropriate access permissions to minimize unauthorized data exposure. Adopting data security tools that provide this advanced level of visibility of all data is critical to ensuring HIPAA compliance but can also help hospitals protect internal data, like staff information.
With so much at stake, healthcare companies need to take proactive steps to fortify their defences against cyber threats and safeguard the trust placed in them by millions of patients. It’s imperative these organizations invest in data security and data access governance technology that can discover, classify, prioritize, and remediate the most sensitive data security risks efficiently, and help them comply with privacy regulations and mandates.
