Directive Blogs

With the end of the year upon us, New York State’s health insurance markets and assorted health plans are open. Current enrollees received renewal reminders a few weeks ago, prompting them to act before their coverage lapses.

Unfortunately, as is often the case in such situations, this urgency has given scammers the opportunity to target New Yorkers trying to maintain their insurance coverage.

We keep hearing about major ransomware attacks and data breaches, but it never feels good when something is hit close to home. Unfortunately, that’s the case as a recent cyberattack hit a New York medical billing company that impacted more than 942,000 people and 26 healthcare organizations.

HIPAA—the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act—is a serious concern for all healthcare providers that operate within the United States, and for good reason! Since August 1996, HIPAA has mandated that these healthcare providers comply with various best practices. While HIPAA is relatively familiar to many people for assorted reasons, fewer know about HITRUST (the Health Information Trust Alliance) and how these acronyms ultimately cooperate with one another.

2020 was, obviously, a challenging year for healthcare providers. In addition to the obvious issue of the COVID-19 pandemic creating serious operational, financial, and supply chain difficulties, cybersecurity concerns didn’t go away during this time. Let’s consider some of the additional stresses that IT security needs can, will, and have placed on healthcare providers.

After decades of inadequate data protections, scores of regulations have been put in place to help protect the sensitive data businesses store. Industries, such as healthcare and financial services, are highly-regulated environments precisely because of the type of data they manage. Personal data is highly valuable to bad actors like hackers and other cybercriminals. We thought it would be a good time to talk about not mistakenly exposing this highly-coveted information to the wild.

It’s important to note that all parties involved in patient care (including the patient) benefit from the Electronic Health Record (EHR). These systems are now fundamental to a successful health maintenance system. As more technology is developed that could be integrated into the EHR platform, there is a stalemate of sorts keeping EHR technology from being what it could be. Today, we will briefly discuss some of the issues. 

A security audit is designed to test the overall integrity of your business when it comes to its IT security. In today’s environment, businesses need to have strengthened fortifications in place to protect themselves from cyberthreats, and these fortifications need to be properly tested and reviewed over time. Let’s talk about some of the types of audits and their benefits, and how you can assess your security.

Back in January, Windows 7 reached end-of-life. This doesn’t cause your Windows 7 computer to stop working. However, without support and updates, Windows 7 will slowly, but surely, develop security holes. Any software unable to be updated is by default HIPAA non-compliant and that includes any computer still using Windows 7.

If there is any industry that connected devices are undeniably useful in, it would have to be the medical field. Unfortunately, recent news would suggest that connected devices should be avoided as the BlueKeep vulnerability is still able to attack medical systems… for an unfortunate reason. Find out more by reading on.

If your work requires you to store medical data, you should be aware of how important your data security is, as a problem could potentially put your business at risk of closing up shop permanently. Security has to be a priority with so many regulations setting compliance standards that must be followed. How can you balance the effectiveness of your business without undermining its security?

Today, perhaps now more than ever before, technology is making strides toward making its users consider ways to stay healthier. Wearables are one of the primary examples of how technology is aiming to make users both more active and more interested about their own health. At 2018’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, this technology was front and center, showcasing how far it has come in just a year’s time.

Security has never been easy for any business that deals with sensitive information. Nowadays, even a small business that uses an Internet connection has to worry about hackers and malware of all types. This is especially problematic for small healthcare offices that need to keep sensitive information secure and safe from online threats.

This subject isn’t very interesting outside of hospital administrators… or for hospital administrators, but there’s no denying that healthcare is one of the most important industries in our society today; and one that is having a technology overhaul at present. The influx of cheaper and more powerful technology is surely going to be a driving force for healthcare in the 21st century. Under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), the United States government has followed the lead of other Western nations in forcing entities to upgrade their healthcare practice’s information technology for the betterment of patients, insurers, and health care providers.

Technology is invading all practices, including those of medical offices and other health-related institutions like hospitals and dental offices. With the advent of electronic medical records (EMR) and their management systems, medical institutions are capable of eliminating the physical space required to store paper documents, and can instead easily store them in a digital environment. Unfortunately, this also brings its fair share of problems, such as regulatory compliance.