As medical records migrate from paper to pixels, your healthcare organization’s staff must act as healers and digital data guardians, ensuring sensitive patient data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. But what specific data do you need to protect? And how can your healthcare organization ensure it’s doing all it can to prevent bad actors from gaining unauthorized access to patient information?
In this post, we’ll discuss what constitutes sensitive data in healthcare. We’ll also explore six steps your healthcare organization can take to safeguard this valuable information.
What is Sensitive Data?
Sensitive data in healthcare, commonly referred to as protected health information or PHI, encompasses a variety of data. This data includes information about a specific individual’s health, the provision of healthcare, and the payment for healthcare. Protecting PHI is much more important than simply maintaining patient privacy; it’s also a legal requirement under regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Six Steps to Protect PHI
At a time when healthcare data breaches cost an average of $11 million per incident, ensuring PHI remains safe is a regulatory requirement and a financial imperative. Here are six steps you should take to protect your healthcare firm’s data assets:
Conduct A Data Inventory and Classification
To establish a strong foundation for your security strategy, start by thoroughly understanding what sensitive data you have within your organization. Create a comprehensive inventory of all data across your systems and departments, then classify that data based on sensitivity and regulatory requirements. This process should include identifying types and volumes of sensitive data like PHI, financial information, and general business data.
By inventorying and classifying your data, you can design an effective protection strategy that will be the foundation for your other security measures and risk assessments.
Map Data Flows and Identify Data Locations
Once you’ve inventoried and classified your data, you need to understand how it moves within and beyond your organization. This involves identifying everywhere sensitive data lives — on servers or in applications, cloud services, or mobile devices — and mapping out how your organization uses it in various business processes. Trace how data moves between different systems, teams, and external vendors to get a complete picture of its journey.
Understanding these data flows will allow you to identify potential vulnerabilities and design appropriate security controls. For example, you may discover that your accounting team accesses PHI for billing purposes or that your organization shares sensitive information with a cloud service provider. Each of these touchpoints represents a potential risk that needs to be managed, including the need for vendor risk assessments.
Conduct Risk Assessments and Apply Mitigations
After developing a clear understanding of your data landscape, your next step is to assess and address potential risks. This involves performing risk assessments around your sensitive information and identifying potential vulnerabilities, like the possibility of data loss or vendor compromises.
Once you identify risks, it’s time to develop and implement mitigation strategies — including anything from implementing new security measures to conducting due diligence on vendors. And in some cases, you may simply want to accept certain risks where appropriate. Your goal should be to understand where the risks are and then make a plan to address them.
Implement Strong Access Controls and Encryption
Another important component of any data protection strategy is limiting who can access sensitive data. To protect data confidentiality, you must control who has access to sensitive data, ensuring only those who need it can access it. Implementing robust authentication methods, including multi-factor authentication (MFA), is important to this strategy.
Encryption is another powerful tool for protecting sensitive healthcare data — especially mobile devices and laptops, which can be easily lost or stolen. Encrypting these devices means that even if they fall into the wrong hands, the sensitive data remains protected. It’s also important to encrypt data in transit between systems, safeguarding it as it moves through your organization and beyond.
Develop And Test an Incident Response Plan
The unfortunate reality is that data breaches can occur despite all your best efforts. So, you must be able to respond quickly and effectively. Invest the time to create a comprehensive incident response plan that’s tailored to your organization’s healthcare-specific scenarios. Your plan should account for the different situations; for example, a breach that involves PHI may need to be handled differently than a breach containing other data types.
To create an effective incident response plan, include procedures for assessing the breach, containing the damage, and notifying affected parties. Additionally, be aware of regulatory reporting requirements for PHI breaches, as these can be more stringent than those for other data breaches.
Implement Comprehensive Staff Training
Protecting sensitive data isn’t just a task for your IT department — it’s a responsibility shared by everyone in your organization. To create a data security culture, provide staff with ongoing comprehensive training. Educate employees on what constitutes PHI, how to identify it, and the policies and procedures for protecting it. Remember, your staff is your first line of defense and your biggest potential vulnerability; any investment you make in increasing their knowledge and awareness strengthens your overall data security posture.
Enhancing Your Data Protection Posture
Protecting sensitive data at your healthcare organization isn’t a one-time activity; it’s an ongoing process that requires vigilance, expertise, and a commitment to privacy and security. By implementing these six essential steps, your healthcare organization can enhance its data protection posture. These steps include conducting a data inventory, mapping data flows, assessing risks, enforcing strong access controls and encryption, and preparing for potential incidents. At a time when data breaches are increasingly common (and costly), taking these steps will help protect the health of your organization and the privacy of your patients. Don’t wait for a breach to take action—partner with Xantrion today to ensure your data security measures are robust and future-proof.
