In recent years, the healthcare industry has undergone rapid and radical changes that have shifted the way hospitals, medical professionals, and patients interact. Looking forward to 2023, it’s now time to focus on forecasting where healthcare may be headed this coming year and beyond. There are several predictions that healthcare professionals should be aware of as you plan for the new year to make well informed decisions when navigating upcoming changes in healthcare.

It's the most wonderful time of the year, but for healthcare professionals, it can also be one of the busiest. As you celebrate with your family and friends, don't forget about HIPAA policies and other privacy regulations that must be followed even during the holiday season. Here are some tips to help make sure you stay on track and maintain compliance policies while still enjoying all the festivities.

Both new and well-known regulations alike were updated during the COVID-19 pandemic to better support healthcare providers. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has seen some modest relaxing of some of its components but remains largely unchanged.

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.

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.

Last month, we hosted the iatricSystems Spring Exchange, where we brought together industry leaders and healthcare organizations to discuss today’s challenges. A big topic of discussion was how today’s hospitals leverage artificial intelligence and automation into their patient privacy monitoring process.

As we put 2020 in the rear-view mirror, the only way to see if we’re making progress is to take a quick glance back. The pandemic made hospitals a large target for malicious cyber threats, and when you look at the data, you’ll see the spikes of data breaches throughout the year.

It was recently announced that a ransomware group that stole sensitive data files during an October cyberattack on Chatham County’s government systems, released the information on the dark and light web. The group published two batches of data containing protected health information and personally identifiable information, which has been viewed more than 30,000 times.

Last year we all saw the resiliency of the healthcare system and how flexible health systems can be — and have to be — in order to continue to protect patients during a troublesome time. Technology was more critical than ever to keep workflows moving and connections strong.