How to Avoid Data Breaches in Healthcare? – Detailed Explanation

The rise of technology has given birth to the digitalization of healthcare, and it has upscaled online and offline (computer/hard drive-centric) patient information data storage. However, this digitalization has also opened a serious problem for the medical industry – data breaches. Even a minor slip in patient record maintenance can lead to disastrous consequences. This blog post explores the solutions to avoid data breaches in healthcare and the reasons behind the data leakage (or breach).

Reasons Behind Data Leakage in Healthcare

Healthcare is one of the easily attackable sectors, and the rise in data breaches continues every day. We will mention some of the major reasons behind healthcare information breaches:

• Cyberattacks: The most common reason behind healthcare data breaches is cyberattacks. Hackers use tactics like phishing, malware, hacking, and ransomware to get hold of the critical patient database for numerous purposes – financial gain, dark web sales, telephonic scams, etc. Since patient information is more valuable and economically viable for hackers instead of credit card details, hackers steal it for usage in identity theft and medical services and even prescribed medicines.
• Human Error: Another significant concern behind healthcare data breaches (or leakages) involves human error (also known as insider threat). Many hospital employees or other insiders may intentionally or accidentally release critical patient data through phishing attacks, malware/ransomware downloading, USB/Hard drive misplacement, and laptop stealing. Moreover, many employees mistakenly send emails with vulnerable information about patients to the wrong person. Lack of human training, carelessness, and malicious intent are the main factors here.
• Unguarded Devices: The third factor behind data breaches in the healthcare industry relates to loose or unsecured data storage devices. Outdated system software, weak passwords, lack of system & data encryption, and negligent safety protocols lead to medical data being compromised. Moreover, the patient data in mobiles, laptops, and other movable devices are susceptible to easy stealing if they are not properly guarded.
• Inappropriate Data Disposal: Connecting this point to human error, many IT professionals in hospitals forget to correctly dispose of older patient data files through safe deletion or physical data shredding, leading to information breaches. Ultimately, it leads to violation of medical data protection laws like HIPAA and serious penalties for the convicted hospitals and the involved personnel.
• Inadequate Data Access Measures: Scarce or negligible data access control standards lead to unauthorized individuals taking control of sensitive patient data. Again, human error is behind it since many IT professionals forget to create data access limits and inadvertently give access to all people, irrespective of their designation.

These reasons are the catalysts behind large-scale data breaches. We will now explore the solutions to prevent healthcare data breaches in the next section.

How to Avoid Data Breaches in Healthcare?

Many healthcare providers ignore patient data security since they think of it as a secondary matter worth not addressing. According to IBM’s 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report, every data breach cost the healthcare industry $10.93 million in 2023 as compared to the global average cost of $4.45 million, signifying the need to secure patient data. We will now explore the solutions to prevent patient data leakages and secure the database.

Enforce Robust Data Accessibility Rules

The first solution to prevent data breaches is the implementation of strong data access controls. Creating secure data access plans ensures data security from unlawful access and provides a tight cushion to critical healthcare data.

• Role-based Access Controls (RBAC): As the head of data security, you must assign data access control to hospital/nursing home employees based on their role (or designation). Moreover, implement strict access policies to sensitive areas like server rooms to prevent unlawful entry and data stealing.
• Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): You must add another layer of data security besides the password for data accessibility. This can be an email code, fingerprint, geolocation (IP address), or software tokens. Moreover, you can use all of them for more secure patient data accessibility.
• Frequent Audits: Another step to avoid data breaches in healthcare is access log auditing. Conduct a thorough auditing of the data access logs to check and manage any unlawful access.

Data Encryption

The second and most crucial data protection method is data encryption. It ensures that your critical patient data stays safe from unauthorized access by making it unreadable to others. Here, healthcare providers should implement the following practices:

• AES (Advanced Encryption Standard): The AES encryption standard uses a single key to encrypt and decrypt the data. The AES-256 is the most used encryption mode for securing sensitive data from unlawful access.
• Data-in-Transit Encryption Protocols: Use protocols like SSL/TLS, PGP, and SMTP to ensure data security during network transit.
• Secure Devices: Another step in ensuring tight-knit patient data security is device encryption. Implement strong security policies covering information protection in mobiles, computers, laptops, servers, and tablets. This way, you can prevent intentional or inadvertent data breaches from the devices.

Staff Training to Prevent Healthcare Data Breaches

Another method to avoid data breaches in healthcare is staff training. Since the majority of data breach incidents involve human involvement, the healthcare professionals must be trained in data breach dangers. Moreover, each hospital must conduct frequent cybersecurity training sessions & data breach simulations to educate the staff on data safety.

Deleted Data Recovery

Many times, healthcare professionals accidentally delete sensitive patient information permanently from the hard drives without realizing their mistake. In that case, the SysTools Hard Drive Data Recovery software can recover the deleted data from the hard drive. This automated utility helps with permanently deleted data and folder recovery from hard drives with FAT, exFAT, and NTFS systems. Moreover, it can recover deleted data from the computer’s hard drives without problems.

Permanently Erase Data From Devices

Many situations demand permanent healthcare data deletion from the devices: regulatory compliance, device decommissioning, and reselling/donation. Hence, it becomes necessary to wipe out all the sensitive patient data to ensure that no one else can access it. Moreover, permanent data erasure becomes crucial to comply with data protection laws like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).

In these situations, the SysTools Data Wipe Software helps you delete sensitive healthcare data from various devices with non-recoverability later on. This automated tool uses the latest data techniques to delete all the binary data, defined as 0s and 1s, and overwrite it with new data. It uses various data-wiping standards, like US DoD/US Air Force, British HMG IS5, and the Peter Gutmann method, to delete the entire device data in multiple steps, or passes, to ensure permanent data deletion without the scope of recovery.

Conclusion

The global healthcare industry faces a serious problem when it comes to patient data management: data breach or leakage. Many factors are responsible for healthcare data breaches, as we discussed in this blog. It becomes necessary to avoid data breaches in healthcare by following the solutions mentioned here. The automated software mentioned here is the perfect method to permanently wipe out patient data from devices without recoverability.

Ultimately, healthcare professionals must stay vigilant to safeguard critical data from unauthorized persons and ensure workplace-only data accessibility.