In healthcare, instant access to patient data could be critical. If doctors can’t get the patient’sinfo they need, the standard of healthcare can be severely compromised with potentially unpredictable consequences.
The privacy and security of patient health information is a top priority for patients and their families, health care providers and professionals, and the government. Laws require many of the key persons and organisations that handle health information to have policies and security safeguards in place to protect your health information - whether it is stored on paper or electronically.
This means that data privacy and storage are of vital importance in healthcare. Downtime must be avoided at all costs. However, data storage and privacy have become increasingly difficult, time-consuming, and expensive for healthcare organisations.
Reasons
There are several reasons for this. To begin with, the volume of healthcare data is growing at an astronomical rate, driven in part by necessary efforts at healthcare organisations to digitise all their patient health records.
Another driver of data growth is diagnostic devices like CT scanners, MRIs and X-ray machines, which produce massive amounts of imaging data. As these technologies continue to advance, the image files they produce become better, have higher resolution and grow larger and larger in file size. Connected devices like fitness monitors and in-room sensors all produce their own streams of data, all of which must be stored and managed.
The storage demand at even a small medical practice can quickly reach petabyte-sized. However, the challenge does not stop there - as the data grows, the time, budget and resources required to store, protect and manage this critical patient data grow as well.
Solution
Medical Practices need proper data backup and security management solutions that deliver constant data availability. The solution must be reliable and cost effective, also covers Virusprotection covering ransomware and cyberattacks, because healthcare organisations are increasingly under attack from a growing list of threats.
Data breaches in healthcare come in a variety of forms. They can include cases in which criminal hackers steal protected health information to commit medical identity theft, or instances when an employee views the records of one patient without authorisation.
This is partly why healthcare suffered more ransomware attacks than any other industry in 2017, according to a report from global cybersecurity insurance company Beazley. The report found that 45per cent of all ransomware attacks in 2017 were aimed at the healthcare sector.
Good News
The good news is that the market also offers solutions designed to handle the ever-increasing amounts of healthcare data securely and cost-effectively, ensuring that quality care is never risked by lack of access to vital information.
Secure Your Practice
Here are five ways healthcare organisations can also protect themselves against the triple threat of out-of-control data costs, system downtime and loss of data integrity:
Look for converged primary and secondary storage
To properly deal with explosive data growth, healthcare centres need to integrate primary, secondary and cloud data-management capabilities which can eliminate storage and data protectionsilos while decreasing the risk of any downtime.
Benefit from cost-effective, scale-out storage
Small and medium-sized healthcare practices with fewer resources and smaller budgets need scalable storage that will adapt to their data needs.
Protect against data degradation
Medical images, in particular, are highly vulnerable to data degradation. The silent corruption of data in medical images caused by bit rot is a significant concern. The problem is compounded because legacy systems store images such as X-rays in a picture archiving and communication system; however, they may not detect if data has been compromised. As a result, the information read from the legacy storage system may be corrupt and unusable. Healthcare organisations also need modern data solutions that can guard against this kind of data degradation.
Inoculate against ransomware
Data protection is also a top priority for practices as they battle against the constant threat of cyberattacks. However, modern healthcare practices solve this issue by implementing a storage solution that protects information continuously and also takes snapshots every 90 seconds. Because the object store is immutable, these snapshots remain completely unaffected in the event of an attack. As a result, medical practices can recover the most recent version of data, and thus thwart any ransomware attack.
Insist on a tangible ROI
Cyberattacks are increasingly common, and as a result, practices are seeking insurance policies that provide coverage in the event of a data breach or loss. Dollar value by insurance companies as part of the risk assessment; this can also quickly add up to tens of millions of dollars in premiums. However, these insurance premiums can be reduced when practices can also demonstrate they have effective data management and protection strategies in place. With the right data management solution, healthcare facilities can not only protect their data and decrease costs, but they can also better treat their patients and ultimately save more lives.
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