Automation Critical for Securing Healthcare Information Systems

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With a lot of healthcare providers automating their medical records, clinical systems, and medical imaging, protecting the privacy of patient information and securing IT infrastructures is becoming increasingly challenging for the healthcare enterprise.

In today’s scenario, healthcare organizations are facing more security threats that increase the risks of inappropriate access to patient information, inability to access the information, and impaired integrity of the information. In this threat landscape, healthcare focused enterprise customers need to secure protected health information and critical systems as they support operational requirements for providing clinics and hospitals with continuous access to information.

An effective security management process for a healthcare organization should target specific areas of risk, implement focused security controls for those areas, and automate the monitoring and measurement of controls.

A number of Indian healthcare enterprise customers such as Apollo or Fortis Healthcare are working with their business partners and security vendors to design and implement security and privacy measures to support their deployments of electronic medical records systems.

Privacy and Security for Healthcare Enterprise

Today there is an increased emphasis on improving quality of care, reducing costs, attracting referrals, and retaining top talent drives automation and adoption of electronic record systems in the healthcare environment. These trends include increased uninterrupted connectivity, which enable around-the-clock patient information access for physicians as well as new methods of communication between providers, payers, pharmacies, and patients. In addition, they support communication with external service providers such as billing, transcription, and radiology imaging interpretation services.

The expanding scope of intertwined and interconnected networks between hospitals, clinics, physicians’ offices, remote contractors, suppliers, university networks, and other external parties is taking the overall healthcare ecosystem together and changing the footprint and characteristics of the secure enterprise architecture.

Heralding a new era of convergence, laptops, notepads and convergence-friendly mobile devices are proliferating both inside and outside the hospital—as are interconnected medical devices that, increasingly, operate on common IT platforms and are susceptible to the same security risks as traditional IT devices.

In this constantly evolving healthcare environment for the enterprise, traditional security measures such as firewalls, antivirus, and intrusion detection and prevention systems are no longer providing the required levels of granularity, protection, and enforcement required for compliance with security and privacy regulations.

The future requirements for the healthcare enterprise for meaningful use are expected to include provisions for ensuring privacy and security of patient data, as well as sharing communicable data with health information exchanges. And controlled automation is likely to help in securing the critical data for the healthcare enterprise.