Last month, we hosted our first major virtual event – the iatricSystems Fall Exchange – that covered the top challenges healthcare organizations face in 2020, including privacy and security, clinical improvements and report writing.

Hospitals and healthcare organizations all over the country are facing similar privacy and security challenges – especially this past year. From an increase of breaches, the risk of ransomware and remote accessibility for vendors and employees, 2020 has opened up plenty of new security gaps. The good news is when so many people go through the same thing, there’s a lot to share and a whole lot more to learn.

With Cybersecurity Awareness Month right around the corner (October), now’s the time for healthcare security teams to review their security positioning and begin to strategize about how they can improve.

A recent COVID-19 outbreak occurred at a Springfield MA hospital due to an employee returning to work after visiting another state, increasing the hospital’s infected rate to 26 employees and 14 patients.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, hackers have continuously targeted credentials to gain access to enterprise networks, particularly those in healthcare, given the rise in remote care and telework. Here are a few recent examples:

Last year, there were 798 confirmed incidences of internal and external healthcare breaches according to the Verizon 2020 Data Breach Investigation Report. We read about these incidents virtually daily, and yet, instead of breach numbers reducing, the numbers continue to rise. Of those incidents, 48 percent were caused by insiders.

We recently caught up with a few iatricSystems customers, and they revealed that they discovered that some of their employees were inappropriately viewing patients’ COVID-19 test results. They credit their ability to figuring this out to their Patient Privacy solution, which alerted them of the inappropriate access to patient information.

You’ve heard the recent – and sometimes overly-used – buzzword “the new normal” when referring to how organizations are conducting work during COVID-19. Yet still, as businesses re-open, many predict there won’t be a full-shift back from working remotely, and that what is going on today will continue to be the “new normal” for a lot of us.

As an organization in the healthcare industry, you already know you’re at a higher target for threats because of the information you store and transmit. Most hospitals do their due diligence to set up security standards to protect patient information from outside threats, but then often underestimate the exponential risk of threats that can happen within the organization.