What is the primary reason that patients' protected health data is so vulnerable?
Put simply, the answer is neglect, David C. Kibbe, MD, president and CEO for DirectTrust told HIT Consultant.
"Ironically, the push to make healthcare information systems more interoperable and the rush into mobile and wearable healthcare applications may be increasing the vulnerability of health information to hacking events," Dr. Kibbe continued. "Fortunately, there are a number of things that can be done to improve security and better protect the privacy of healthcare information transferred by and stored in the health information technology systems used by healthcare providers across the spectrum."
Here are the three recommendations Dr. Kibbe makes for protecting health information as it is exchanged.
1. The single most important step organizations can take to mitigate the threat of hackers accessing protected health information is to use multi-factor authentication.
2. To be secure, data must be encrypted in two ways — during storage and in transit.
3. Effective privacy and security is more about people than technology.
Read the full post here.