According to one recent study, only about 4% of all organizations say that they feel confident in their current approach to cybersecurity.
If you needed a single statistic to underline how harrowing things have become in the fast-paced digital world that we're now living in, let it be that one.
Over the last decade, data breaches have seen a major upward trend - increasing in prominence by about 200%. I
t's gotten to the point where some type of vulnerability is identified and published at a rate of every 17 minutes.
But for as serious as the situation is across the board, things get even more severe when you talk about highly specialized industries like healthcare.
If your local small business brick-and-mortar retailer suffers a data breach, it will be a bad situation, to be sure.
But even if your own information is compromised, it will probably be limited to transaction and other finance-related data.
If the private practice or other healthcare facility that you see on a regular basis gets compromised, it's an entirely different matter.
Here, people can see your entire medical history and they can extrapolate all sorts of things as a result, leading to a massive invasion of privacy.
According to the experts at The HIPAA Journal, there were 725 data breaches reported to the OCR in 2023 alone.
Across those breaches, more than 133 million records were exposed or impermissible disclosed.
All of this is to say that while cybersecurity is a pressing topic in every industry, it's especially concerning when you look at the current landscape as it relates to healthcare.
This is why strengthening IT security in healthcare must become a top priority as we move into 2025 and beyond.
Getting to this point isn't necessarily difficult, but it will require a lot of proactive, hard work along the way.
One of the most important things you can do to start protecting your healthcare organization from cyber threats involves learning as much as you can about the types of threats you're likely to face in the first place.
Many of us grew up in a time when getting a "computer virus" meant that someone in our household downloaded a file they weren't supposed to.
They executed it, and a virus took control of their machine.
Not that this was ever exclusively the case, but things have evolved far beyond that point.
One of the biggest types of threats that healthcare organizations in particular are likely to face takes the form of ransomware attacks.
These are where cyber criminals essentially "lock" your machine or system through encryption, cutting off access to critical data.
They then demand some form of payment for the release of that information.
Considering the fact that this will likely involve personal healthcare information for patients, this is obviously a situation that you should avoid at all costs.
Others include but are certainly not limited to ones like:
Generally speaking, healthcare organizations of all types have become a primary target for hackers due to the value of the data that can be compromised.
If even a small private practice gets hacked, attackers could gain personal information like Social Security numbers, insurance details, medical histories, and more.
If they don't outright use this information for identity theft, it can command a hefty price tag on the black market.
Healthcare organizations are also those that typically rely on legacy systems like older computers and devices, which themselves have vulnerabilities that modern technology does not.
Knowing this, hackers go after these businesses as targets because they're comparably "easier" than most.
In addition to the financial penalties that you'll begin to incur almost immediately, one of the biggest consequences of a data breach in a regulated industry like healthcare is a loss of trust.
If patients don't trust you to safeguard their personal information, can they trust you with their health?
Other penalties include but are not limited to ones like legal liability, and of course, operational disruption that can be difficult to fully recover from.
When securing sensitive data in a healthcare environment, understand that there is no "one right way" to get this job done.
You need to assess your own organization and the unique risks it faces to come up with an appropriate plan of attack to stay safe.
Because of that, the healthcare IT security best practices that you follow are about a series of smaller and more strategic tactics working in tandem with one another.
These can include but are not limited to things like the following:
To speak to that last point, continuous monitoring and threat detection is of paramount importance.
Any tool that you invest in should offer advanced features like real-time alerting, vulnerability scanning and patching, behavioral analysis, and more.
Although it may seem counterintuitive, the number one step your healthcare organization can take to build a secure IT environment has nothing to do with your technology and is all about your people.
You must invest in regular training and awareness education so that people know exactly what types of threats they're likely to encounter and the consequences of "getting it wrong."
Employees at all levels should be educated on cybersecurity threats, safe data handling practices, and the importance of maintaining security protocols.
Awareness campaigns should be ongoing, as threats evolve constantly.
You'll also want to promote a security-first mindset, which is something that must begin with organizational leadership.
If people see how seriously you are taking the issue of cybersecurity, they will start to see it that way as well.
Managed Service Providers (or MSPs) can play a crucial role in supporting all this, in large part by making it easier to conduct regular security audits and compliance checks to identify weaknesses and evaluate response plans.
But unlike a traditional in-house IT team which will likely take a "break/fix" approach to cybersecurity, an MSP can be proactive by offering 24/7/365 network monitoring and other threat detection services.
They can help you account for your data backup and disaster recovery needs, and can even offer compliance assistance, as well.
If they have industry-specific experience, they should be able to get you up to speed on HIPAA without you needing to do much of anything at all on your own.
In the end, maybe the most important thing for you to take away from all this is that strengthening IT security in healthcare is not something that you "do once and forget about."
This is especially true in a field where the stakes are as high as they are in healthcare.
Think about things from the point of view of a software developer.
From the moment their product is released to market, it is a target for those with malicious intentions.
Every day, hackers will work hard to discover vulnerabilities that can be taken advantage of.
Those developers will work hard to patch them and get updates into the hands of users before it's too late.
It's a never-ending battle that comes hand-in-hand with the lives we currently live.
Cybersecurity in a healthcare environment is absolutely no different - especially as wearable devices and other examples of technology become more heavily ingrained in our every waking moment.
Because of that, you need to make sure that you're aware of the most common cybersecurity threats and the consequences of a data breach in regulated industries.
You need to learn the role that encryption, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems play.
You need to believe in the importance of continuous monitoring and threat detection.
You need to do all this and more, all to help create the culture of security awareness within your organization that will hopefully help fend of a worst-case scenario.
If you take a look at the list of the top data breaches in healthcare history, a few things will stand out immediately.
For starters, you're literally talking about hundreds of millions of records having been breached since 2014.
The biggest breach occurred in 2024 when a business associate of a healthcare organization suffered a hacking/IT incident that quickly spiraled out of control.
But what you should notice is that, while a lot of the names on that list are larger organizations, there are many smaller ones, too.
This helps to underline the point that there's no such thing as an organization "too small" to avoid attracting unwanted attention.
You will be a target - at this point, that's more or less a foregone conclusion.
What you can do, however, is prevent yourself from becoming a victim.
That means putting up the strongest defense that you can and being as proactive as humanly possible.
It doesn't guarantee the safety of your organization, your employees, or your customers/patients, but it does go a long way toward mitigating risk as much as possible.
If you'd like to find out more information about strengthening IT security in healthcare and the best practices that you need to be paying attention to for 2025, or if you have any additional questions that you'd like to go over with someone in a bit more detail, please don't hesitate to contact us today
Then, reach out to Integrity Technology Solutions to see how we can help you and your business.