A hospital should be a safe place for patients to go when they need help. However, this is not always the case. From medical equipment being infected with malware to hackers stealing confidential records and more, many dangers come from using outdated software.
This blog post will provide you with a guide on how to adhere to security practices and standards for your hospital management software so that you can stay safe.
It is impossible to stop unauthorized users from accessing your system, but you can create hard to penetrate barriers. This includes using strong passwords, hardware encryption, and other security features offered by your software provider to protect the data stored on computers from being accessed or tampered with.
The following are a few of the practices you can use to raise the software security standard in your hospital or clinic.
Well Defined Access Controls
Make sure only the people who are authorized to access certain data have this privilege. Give users the minimum amount of rights they need for their specific job.
This will make it much harder for unauthorized users to break into your system and steal valuable information from you or infect any machines connected with hospital management software.
Ensure Data Protection
If you are using hospital management software, there is usually an option to enforce strong passwords on all accounts that can be used by the employees of this institution as well; maybe even more advanced security features like two-factor authentication or fingerprint scans should also become mandatory at some point
Never store sensitive information without encrypting it first as this may lead you into a situation where confidential records are stolen which could result in some serious consequences
Secure remote access from outside the clinic/hospital premises.
Using VPN tunnels helps to a great extent. Enforce security features like two-factor authentication, multi-factor authorization, and fingerprint scans for any type of access to the system; this will make sure that no one has unauthorized or unauthenticated remote connections.
Patient Confidentiality Management policies
Patient Confidentiality Management policies are practiced by vendors to follow the regulations of the law to provide a secure and private environment for patients.
For additional security, consider encrypting databases or folders with sensitive data which could be used by hackers in order to get access into your system.
Employee access policies
Maintain a matrix of job levels and access, this will provide accountability for any employee who has been given specific permissions to the system.
User names should be changed regularly by employees or administrators in order not to give hackers something that can easily identify them with your company's computer ids.
Employees must be trained to apply strong password policies effectively. They should make use of automated password reset after a fixed number of days, force change password on first time login, multi-factor authentication, strong encrypted alphanumeric passwords using upper and lower case.
Remove ex-employees from access as soon as they are terminated.
Ensuring that there is a separation of duties for the employees with access to these types of services in order not to give them too much power over your system. For example, have one person update data and another log on so they can't both be updating at once.
Audit Control capabilities
The Audit Control (or Logging) module is designed to improve transparency and provide a thorough, accurate overview of all transactions in the application.
This helps stakeholders review leakage or misuse from within the company while ensuring that everything has been logged for auditing purposes.
Vendor access to data
Make sure you are informed about the vendor's level of access. Vendors require access for debugging, deployments, patch management, etc. but the vendor has to ensure that this access is secure enough and that their employees are trustworthy.
Insta provides remote support for all customer activities. The temporary user ids/passwords are logged, tracked, and auto-destroyed after 2 hours to ensure the security of our customers' data while the company is performing maintenance on their site or they need help with an issue because Insta's proactive monitoring ensures that no one else has unauthorized access during this time frame.
Hospital/Clinic owned device or BYOD policy
Some hospitals prefer BYOD(Bring Your Own Device) over keeping their own devices for several administrative and clinical works, but from a security point of view, it is always better to have a centrally managed and secured device over BYOD.
If your hospital follows a BYOD policy it is always good to encrypt all data on devices and enforce strong password policies.
Doctors that use BYOD should always be following their own personal security practices for the device they are using to prevent malware or other data breaches which could affect patient health care privacy.
It is high time for hospitals to follow standard policies and security practices to avoid such incidents from happening.
Learn how Insta can help your hospital management adhere to software security practices and standards.
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