Keep These Healthcare IT Best Practices in Mind for Your Practice

Healthcare technology is changing, and changing fast. Even beyond your typical concerns like data security and operational efficiency, healthcare IT faces unique challenges specific to the industry. Today, we want to cover some of the best practices that healthcare organizations should follow in regards to their IT. We’ll explore topics such as patient trust, legal compliance, and so much more.

Compliance and Regulations

Healthcare is subject to all kinds of regulations you’ll need to comply with, chief among them being HIPAA.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) provides guidelines—more accurately, mandates—for how practices protect electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI). This means that everything you do is under scrutiny, from how you protect patient records to how you transmit files. If you can’t comply with these guidelines, your practice could face serious penalties, fines, and damages to its reputation.

We recommend you implement encryption, multi-factor authentication, and regular security updates to ensure you remain in compliance with HIPAA.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Downtime is even more dangerous for healthcare organizations; in fact, it could be a matter of life and death.

Imagine if your practice were to lose access to patient records or if it experienced a system crash due to a cyberattack or negligence. You’ll need more than just a system that can back up data; you need one that can regularly test your recovery procedures to make sure you get back in action immediately following a disaster. Furthermore, your plan should outline steps to contain issues and notify affected parties.

Remember, the last thing you want is to have a backup, then find out your plan doesn’t work or your data has been corrupted.

Security Awareness Through Training

Even if you have all your security ducks in a row, human error can create additional risks for your organization that you must be ready to address.

You must ensure your organization is providing continuous and comprehensive cybersecurity awareness training for all staff. Topics you should cover include phishing attacks, password security, and how to properly handle sensitive patient information. We recommend that you not only train your employees, but update them regularly and test them in between with simulated attacks.

After all, at the end of the day, you cannot always rely on security technology, especially since threats are increasingly targeting employees directly through phishing attacks.

The truth is that while the same principles govern most other types of IT best practices, healthcare IT is a whole different beast. To ensure your practice is well-protected and secured, we recommend you work with Eclipse IT, Inc.. To find out more, call us at (619) 331-4008 today.