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.

Conference season is exciting – you meet new people, learn new things, and most companies reveal new products and solutions. As you know, in light of COVID-19, conferences and tradeshows are on pause for now. But, we wanted to remind you that even though we can’t shake hands or say hello in person, we’re still here for you.

As states begin to lift some of the COVID-19 restrictions and businesses begin to reopen, healthcare organizations are still facing many of the same challenges presented at the beginning of this pandemic.

So much has emerged from this pandemic: kindness, commitment, sacrifice, and perseverance. We’ve heard the heartwarming stories of nurses connecting families in our new touchless world. We’ve seen the PPE marks and bruises on the faces of healthcare professionals from working tireless shifts.