If your privacy team is like most hospitals, managing influxes of privacy tasks, as a result of new privacy concerns can be difficult. While the answer of bringing in 3rd party help might seem expensive or difficult to manage, in reality, supplementing your privacy team as needed by using Patient Privacy Managed Services can help your healthcare organizations quickly scale up to accommodate new requests and scale down when resources are no longer needed.

Unauthorized access to patients’ protected health information (PHI) is illegal — so why do healthcare professionals keep doing it? How do you get them to stop?A recent JAMA Network study on PHI breaches provides insights into employee behavior regarding privacy data, and how that behavior can be corrected.

Our patient privacy experts hit the road for the first time since early 2020 this month, and it was great to be back! iatricSystems attended ViVE and HIMSS over the past two weeks, and it was wonderful catching up with old friends, seeing new faces, and talking patient privacy with some of the brightest minds in the industry. For those that were able to attend the conference with us, welcome back, and if you couldn’t attend, let’s catch you up on what you might have missed.

Looking back on 2021, healthcare organizations have been pushed to their technological limit. Increased patient demand and staffing shortages have forced nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and lab technicians to look to the digital space to increase efficiency, provide adequate care, and protect PHI data. As healthcare organizations adopt a more digital approach, what does this mean for the future of healthcare? Let’s look at the top trends that I predict are here to stay.

Looking back to 2021, the healthcare industry was challenged to adapt to patient surges, remote workers, staffing shortages, and more. Throughout the past year, hospital organizations and HIPAA pivoted to be nimbler with actions such as relaxing compliance guidelines on telemedicine to improve patient care but may also have created new security gaps.

During our second iatricSystems Fall Exchange, we brought together industry leaders and healthcare organizations to discuss today’s challenges, including the current threat landscape and how to protect your organization from internal and external threats.

When you think of October, you likely think about spooky season. Ghosts, witches, black cats, and monsters galore. But in the world of technology, there’s not much scarier than the overwhelming gloom of a potential cyber threat. So, it makes sense that Cybersecurity Awareness Month would also take place in October. Instead of sending shivers through your spine with scary stories of breaches and ransomware threats, we’ll skip to the good part. We’re here to help you #BeCyberSmart by offering actionable advice and tips you can use to improve and prioritize your cybersecurity efforts right now.

At the beginning of the pandemic, hospitals had to jump into action to find safer ways to deliver patient care without putting patients at risk of contracting COVID-19 in doctors’ offices and hospitals. The solution was telehealth, and it was widely adopted very quickly. A 2020 consumer survey found that the number of people who have used telehealth doubled during the pandemic, from 39.4 percent pre-COVID-19 to 79.5 percent post-quarantine.

A few weeks ago, the largest global ransomware attack on record occurred, and cyber criminals demanded $70 million in ransoms. While this attack targeted the large-scale global software company, Kaseya, it impacted between 800 and 1,500 businesses of various sizes and industries. The hacker group behind the attack also previously targeted and successfully breached the Las Vegas-based University Medical Center in late June of this year.