The digital takeover of healthcare is in full swing. Electronic health
records (EHRs), telemedicine, and health applications – apps – reshape
how medicine is practiced and how patients engage with the medical
profession. Like every technological disruption inevitably leads to
smooth sailing in the long term, this transition promises to be no
different. However, change is never smooth, and as the digital
transformation of healthcare infiltrates deeper into our lives, it
continues to raise questions and introduce its challenges,
particularly regarding the privacy and security of patient data. As
increasingly more software is used in medicine, the importance of
preserving the privacy of this data grows.
Furthermore, protecting patient privacy is necessary to support
information exchange and protect the trust between patient and carer.
Information breaches may result in patient identity theft and
financial loss. It can also erode patient confidence. In addition,
healthcare entities face large penalties when failing to comply with
data privacy regulations, for example, in the United States with HIPAA
(Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and the European
Union with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
Healthcare software demands the implementation of several data privacy
mechanisms. You will learn the importance of it and the best practices
to employ in protecting data in this data. By understanding this topic
and applying industry best practices, healthcare institutions can
ensure the wellness of their patients and the good name of their
services.
Patient confidentiality is a fundamental principle of medical ethics and a legal standard that regulates the disclosure of patient information. Maintaining a patient’s health information as private and secure is essential to ensuring that individuals are not further distressed and that the profession of medicine is protected in a culture of trust. Data privacy medical care must ensure that patient health records and other personal data are kept private and secure.
Medical and healthcare data are particularly vulnerable to cyber attacks, data breaches, and other types of information violations that can have serious consequences. Preventing data breaches not only protects the sensitive data driving the healthcare sector but can also enable faster recovery when an incident does occur. By keeping patient and healthcare data private, entities and individuals can avoid compromising personal information, exposure to identity theft and fraud, and potential exploitation.
Patient trust in healthcare providers – rooted, in significant part, in their reasonable expectations of confidentiality and care for, and preparation in handling, their health information – needs to be built on a foundation of privacy. Without that assurance, patients will not trust healthcare providers with medical information. They will not engage with them on the open and honest terms necessary to allow the treatment and cooperation crucial to care. This is why privacy issues are so important in a patient-provider relationship.
Data breaches can be extremely costly to healthcare organizations due to regulatory penalties, legal repercussions, and other expenses. Regulatory laws set wide-ranging and strict penalties for non-compliance (such as the HIPAA and GDPR), typically involving large fines and lawsuits. Along with regulatory penalties, healthcare providers incur non-discretionary costs such as breach notifications, lawsuits, and remediation fees, which can all be quite costly. In light of these implications, it is clear that data privacy has become a subject that should not be underplayed, as the cost of breaches is staggering. Companies can face heavy fines or possibly dissolution from hacks.
Much time should be spent on practices such as data encryption. Information encryption is key and can happen at rest (to protect stored data from unauthorized access) and in transit (to protect data from being compromised while traveling between systems or users). Strong encryption standards, such as AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), help make sure that patient data doesn’t get breached or leaked into the wrong hands.
Access controls to ensure only company personnel and those with a need-to-know are accessing sensitive data. Put these people and security engineers back into their roles because they will then know how to implement role-based access controls (RBAC) to restrict access based on a job's function or duties. Configure multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all user access to data.
Security audits should be conducted regularly to uncover deficiencies and to evaluate the extent to which data privacy controls are functioning as they should be expected to. Penetration testing and vulnerability assessments can form part of such security audits to expose deficiencies in the system's asset inventory and areas requiring improvement. Monitoring systems and networks in real-time with an automated component could detect and escalate suspicious or potential malicious activities so that prompt mitigation can be implemented.
Additionally, employees need to be made aware of the importance of data privacy, and trained in maintaining highest levels of data privacy, i.e., being aware of phishing attempts, protecting passwords and other login credentials maintaining the once-only principle of data processing, protecting sensitive data, and reporting potential security breaches among other things.
Taking measures to ensure the security of your software will go a long way in protecting your data if it is compromised. Follow software programming best practices, such as input validation and error handling, to prevent exploitable software vulnerabilities. Patching software and keeping it updated periodically is necessary to close security holes and stop new threats to your data privacy before it becomes compromised. Make sure your software development lifecycle (SDLC) takes on incorporating security early in the design phase of a product through the production, testing, and deployment phases.
Besides HIPAA, protecting sensitive healthcare data from third-party access relies heavily on advanced encryption. Several algorithms can be applied to encrypt data at rest and on the move so that, even if the data is stolen or accessed without authorization at any point, it remains inaccessible and unsuitable for any meaningful use without the appropriate decryption keys. End-to-end encryption, where the sender’s side encrypts the information and only the recipient’s side decrypts and gives access to the information, further ensures privacy and security.
In healthcare, blockchain is a new way to ensure data cannot be meddled with or corrupted. It creates a transparent ledger of data transactions that is immutable and verifiable. Each data transaction becomes part of a block, linked to prior blocks, and difficult to change or tamper with. Through blockchain, patient data can be kept confidential and secure while simultaneously being shared within and across healthcare providers, patients, and other stakeholders, allowing for more optimal and effective medicine. Smart contracts could be used to automate the application of privacy policies and data-sharing contracts.
AI is also used for data privacy to help detect threats in real-time. AI can detect unusual actions indicative of possible data breaches or malicious activity. AI can also help prevent these events through machine learning on raw data that continuously learns and adjusts its understanding of potential threats. Respond to these AI-determined threats by taking action more quickly to isolate and handle a breach or event before it grows into a massive problem. AI in healthcare will help prevent such threats from becoming an issue; for example, an AI assessment could identify unusual actions that might suggest a threat to a healthcare system, whereas a human reviewer could overlook this contextually unusual behavior.
A basic tension in designing useful data privacy is the two competing requirements to make information accessible and secure. Providing access to patient data often involves rapid and easy retrieval. Health providers must be able to instantaneously access patients’ electronic records to prevent, diagnose, and treat promptly and effectively. Making this data accessible only to authorized personnel in the face of strong but explicit laws is desirable and respectable. This introduces pressure points because robust access controls, encryption, and authentication methods must be designed to avoid unduly impeding workflow and efficiency.
The cyber threat environment is constantly changing due to the emergence of new vulnerabilities and attack vectors. Thus, healthcare organizations face the challenge of keeping their security at the forefront by constantly updating their security practices and technologies. The regulatory environment is also dynamic due to the timely introduction of new data privacy laws or amendments to existing ones that organizations must comply with or face strict measures or penalties, such as the ones defined by the amendments to HIPAA, GDPR, and any other regulation. Organizations must stay vigilant and continuously update their data privacy policies and practices to remain compliant.
Care and treatment can involve third-party vendors or partners, such as IT support, data storage, or specialized medical software, which can create additional risks to data privacy if those third parties don’t also have strict security standards. Addressing third-party risks includes detailed due diligence and creating checks and balances through continuous audits and monitoring. There must also be detailed data privacy and security requirements by all parties in the contract terms.
Emerging technologies will offer additional ways to secure data privacy. These include quantum encryption—a technology being refined today to provide impossible-to-break levels of data security—and machine learning, which is already enabling better threat detection and risk mitigation. These systems help analyze large amounts of data in real time, identifying and preventing known and unknown threats before they cause damage. The key will be integrating these emerging technologies into healthcare systems.
The regulatory framework around data privacy continues to evolve in response to new challenges, new platforms, and new ways of violating patient privacy protection. Important regulatory efforts such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States have led the way in the development of data protection standards; however, in an era of rapid technological change, it seems likely that regulations will continue to get larger – more intensive, more explicit, more binding, covering more forms of patient data, and with increasing requirements around data security and patient consent. But, as the landscape of data-protection compliance continues to develop, healthcare organizations will need to keep up.
A top-down approach has dominated healthcare in which decision-makers – such as pharmaceutical companies, insurance agencies, and some healthcare entities – have accumulated and controlled the data. As a corrective to that, a greater degree of patient-controlled data is now emerging throughout many healthcare systems. By owning their data, patients can decide who can access it and how and when they can use it (for what purpose, who owns it, duration of use, etc). Consequently, technologies such as the blockchain can enable a more decentralized and secure approach to sharing health data. As Healthcare Weekly explains this week: To make it happen, the patient’s data is transferred into a tamper-proof and transparent matrix, supported, in this case, by a blockchain. The patient grants certain partners access to the data and thus controls who can view the data and who cannot. Regardless of the partner, the patient decides what he or she wants to divulge and what is forbidden. Patient-controlled data is a part of larger global movements towards personalized medicine and patient-centric care.
With the digital transformation of healthcare, protecting sensitive
patient information has become more pressing than ever. The reliance
of healthcare facilities on patient information for delivering medical
care and its sensitivity to data breaches and leakage underscore the
importance of protecting patient confidentiality and safeguarding
sensitive data. Implementing the right guidelines, strict policies,
adequate access controls, and continuous monitoring would go a long
way toward securing the information infrastructure of healthcare
facilities.
With new emerging technologies, updated regulatory and policy
frameworks, and a growing number of patients wanting more control over
their own data, the future of healthcare data privacy looks bright. As
healthcare evolution continues, safeguarding patient information will
become a crucial part of the industry’s progress toward sustainability
and trust. Medical information and the sanctity of patient privacy are
non-negotiable; care providers must adopt strong data privacy
frameworks to protect us all.