Don’t Let Your Hospital Data be Compromised
The numbers are staggering – too many healthcare providers are allowing their data to fall into the hands of the
wrong people. According to Redspin, a security firm, around 30 million patient records a year have been compromised since the HITECH Act went into effect in 2009. These are just the number of exposed records that are reported to Health and Human Services, so the number is likely higher. How are you protecting your hospital data?
Protected health information is often found to be left unprotected, which means hospital administrators have never formulated a real plan or strategy for protecting patient information. There was often little reason to do so because hospitals, until 2013, weren’t required to notify patients when their data had been breached. To help put a stop to this lack of foresight and to protect patient information, Congress introduced a HIPAA omnibus rule in 2013. This rule makes it mandatory to notify patients that their information has been compromised.
However, providers need to take further steps to not only ensure that patient information is kept safe, but that this information can also be accessible to medical professionals when they need it. Your plan should include bringing in an offsite vendor that can safely store you medical image data while also giving you near 100 percent uptime so that doctors and radiologists can gain access to them when they are most needed.
The best approach to protecting hospital data, especially for providers that are on limited budgets, is to partner with an offsite vendor that works through multiple Level IV data centers.
Offsite vendors use vendor neutral archiving technology in the cloud to ensure better quality care and business continuity assurances. The incentive to go this route should be to provide better patient care. However, there are data breach repercussions to consider as an incentive as well. When a hospitals’ data is breached, hefty fines are often dealt out. For instance, federal and state governments can levy criminal and civil monetary penalties when breaches occur, some of which can be $1.5 million a year. Regaining patient trust after such a breach can take years.
Cloud-based vendors, once feared as being vulnerable to data breaches, are now offering some of the best resources for protecting your facility and your patients today. Thanks to the security measures at the data centers and the secure URLs that are used to transmit sensitive information, clients of offsite data archiving companies enjoy affordable prices and near 100 percent uptime.
Don’t get caught in a data breach situation – get with an offsite vendor like OffSite Image Management to give you the upper hand. Contact us today and find out how we’ll keep your information clear of disaster or data breach.