Electronic Health Records is the data that contains all the personal information of a patient. It has a patient’s contact information, social security number, health insurance ID and other financial information. If this data gets compromised, hackers get all the information and can misuse it in different ways. So, security and privacy concerns of electronic health records have increased manifold.
In this post, we have listed some of the best safe and secure ways to keep your Electronic Health Records protected.
How can the EHR of a patient be used?
If a patient’s EHR data is breached, then they can do these following things:
- Get and pay for medical care
- Buy items
- Fill prescriptions
- Get access and modify health records
How to Secure your EHR Data?
To maintain privacy, confidentiality, and security of electronic health records, keep these things in mind.
Set rules and policies for managing data:
Some of the most important things to do is setting policies and teach employees how to handle EHRs.
It is also important to keep documentation of everything, informing about to employees and conducting essential training. This step will reduce the level of data breaches and it can also serve as a way to demonstrate your privacy law.
Give training to employees to avoid phishing scams
Conducting pieces of training to spread awareness of cyber threats, EHR can not only be taken by physically stealing, the information can be taken via email scams. According to various reports, the email scams is one of the prevalent ways of stealing data and sensitive information. That’s why, it is important to train the staff to be cautious while dealing with websites, links, emails and file downloads.
Don’t use limit messaging & collaboration apps approved by HIPAA
HIPAA compliant apps are available for storing, sending and receiving important data. Getting tools and apps that are HIPAA compliant and also suitable for companies.
One thing that needs to be considered is that the apps used for email, text messaging, video for sending and receiving data via cloud, email, video conferencing and more will maintain copies of data on developer’s servers.
That’s why it is important to select the apps carefully that assure that they can keep the data secure and stored in cloud and therefore maintain privacy, confidentiality, and security of electronic health records.
Keep your employees updated with latest cyber threat activity
Companies that keep EHRs try to keep the data secured against cyber risks. Every cyber security platform is aware of known data breach, phishing schemes and popular malware and more. However, cybercriminals have been developing new ways to victimize us. So, as soon as you get to know about the new cyber threat, all of the employees should know about it to prevent a data breach.
In this way, you can address the security and privacy concerns of electronic health records of patients and prevent them from getting exposed and risked to be leaked & misused by cybercriminals.