Rethinking tradition in healthcare cybersecurity strategy

Data privacy is about additional than trying to keep personalized data risk-free and safe, says Dr. Eric Liederman, Kaiser Permanente’s director of healthcare informatics – it is an essential ingredient for developing believe in with individuals that healthcare corporations get own security critically.
At the HIMSS 2023 Healthcare Cybersecurity Discussion board, scheduled for September 7 and 8 in Boston, Liederman will spotlight his experiences employing techniques and strategies that foster a tradition of privateness and stability.
“Sufferers genuinely do say in polls and interviews that they definitely care about the security of their information and the protection of their information and facts,” he told Healthcare IT Information in a preview of his presentation.
“If persons never come to feel safe and sound having care, they is not going to get it or they’re going to do points to check out to mitigate their feeling of the unsafe,” these as withholding information and facts from their physicians, Liederman explained. And they “vote with their toes,” he reported.
At one particular well being program, Liederman worked for, he mentioned it was not uncommon that employees and their households would vacation additional than 100 miles to get care somewhere else mainly because the tradition was so “insidious” and it was distinct that privateness and safety ended up not priorities and that any team member could obtain affected individual information.
Now privacy and security characterize a twofold challenge.
Insider threats go further than the pitfalls of personnel that may well get patient data for particular attain or former employees’ qualifications that are compromised by poor actors. There are also perfectly-this means staff that do not have any prison intent but may well go looking for affected individual info out of worry or to share information with a patient’s involved family or mates.
Liederman has been in the trenches performing to determine out how to established up network gates so experienced clinicians and other important healthcare workers – workers who might have merely lapsed in judgment – are aided to cease them selves from breaching HIPAA.
There are also exterior attacks that go over and above ransomware that ruin essential trust in a healthcare organization’s capability to keep individual knowledge protected.
Some cybercriminals search for to steal individual knowledge to extort folks, Liederman reported, monetizing their assaults by likely right after substantial-profile sufferers instantly. An illustration was the late 2022 breach of Medibank, Australia’s major private overall health insurance company, which included the Key Minister’s information.
Country-states that support cybergangs or have cyber espionage plans will also go just after other government’s info, like the U.S. Federal Business office of Staff Management’s, to understand who can be compromised, Liederman stated.
He said his presentation in Boston will protect the implementation of broader insider risk courses, featuring techniques to stop exterior threats that request to extort personal people and ideas for how to perform intently with the communications team to build messaging about what your corporation is executing for privacy and affected individual details defense.
“People kinds of privateness action communications are not finished usually,” Liederman mentioned. “Normally the only matter that we ever get is a detect of privateness methods, which is whole of impenetrable boilerplate”
Liederman’s session, “Private Safety: How cybersecurity and privacy protection create believe in in the healthcare procedure,” is scheduled for 10:55 a.m. on Friday, September 8, at the HIMSS Healthcare Cybersecurity Discussion board in Boston.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Health care IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.