3 IT Best Practices to Follow for Medical Practice

Healthcare IT faces challenges unique to the industry, and if you don’t adapt to them, you risk your practice’s data security and operational efficiency. You don’t want to fall behind with your IT infrastructure—not when there’s so much on the line. Today, we want to explore how your IT practices impact other areas of your medical practice, including patient trust, operational efficiency, and legal compliance, as well as share some best practices to help you manage it all.

Regulations and Compliance

You’re likely intimately aware of how many regulations your practice must comply with, including the biggest among them, HIPAA.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates how practices protect electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI). As a healthcare provider, you’re always going to be scrutinized for how you’re handling records, and especially how you protect and transmit them. Ensuring compliance with these mandates is crucial if you want to avoid legal complications and fines.

Some examples of how to remain HIPAA-compliant include using encryption, multi-factor authentication, and routine security updates.

Data Backup and Disaster Recovery

Downtime for healthcare organizations is more than just lost productivity and profits—in some cases, it could mean risk or loss of life.

If your practice loses access to important patient records due to a system crash or a cyberattack, you’re looking at one of two options. First, you better hope you have a backup of your practice’s records and a recovery procedure to get back in business. If you don’t have a data backup and disaster recovery solution in place, you risk losing everything, which would be a catastrophic loss for your practice.

We recommend that you not only have backup and disaster recovery plans, but also routinely test them to ensure the process goes off without a hitch—and, of course, that your plan outlines the steps needed to notify affected parties, such as patients and health insurance providers.

Security Training for Awareness and Prevention

It’s not enough to protect your infrastructure with security solutions; you also have to address the possibility of human error through training and awareness.

Your practice should provide continuous and comprehensive cybersecurity awareness training to employees that addresses topics such as phishing attacks, password security, and how to handle sensitive patient data. We also recommend that you regularly test employees to make sure the lessons stick. This will show them the practical use of their training and provide a simulated, low-stakes environment where employees have permission to screw up and learn a little bit in the process.

Security has never been more important, so make sure you take steps toward shoring up your employees, especially as cybercriminals wise up and take the shortcut to breaking through your defenses (your fallible human employees).

If your organization needs help implementing any of the above solutions or best practices, we’ve got you covered. To get started, reach out to WatchPoint Solutions at (848) 202-8860.