Since the inception of HIPAA, Information Technology (IT) in healthcare network environments has grown to become a complex driver of entire hospital systems. Since the growth of cyberattacks on hospitals, IT has also acquired the not-so-clear mandate in many cases to protect their networks against these attacks.
The problem with shoving cybersecurity into professionals with experience in hospital information technology is that cybersecurity is a completely different beast that many very good professionals working within healthcare IT either lack the experience or bandwidth to handle.
Today, I want to clarify how IT teams and cybersecurity teams need to work together—but more specifically why that aren’t one and the same. I will also touch on how your hospital might consider augmenting healthcare cybersecurity to embolden your IT Solution.
But first, what exactly is Information Technology?
The primary role of an IT professional is to research and implement technology that will keep your hospital successful. IT staff should understand your entire hospital network from the front end to the back and should be able to help in implementing technology tailored to the specific needs of your hospital.
That does NOT mean that IT professionals will have all the answers alone. Rather, good IT hospital support staff understand where to go for additional resources, meticulously evaluate options on what equipment and solutions best fit the needs demanded by hospital staff and are able to oversee that appropriate systems and security are in place to ensure complete functionality of your hospital network AND that security needs are being met (not leaving you a target to ransomware).
Bottom line: the main goals of an IT specialist include maximizing your network’s performance, minimizing its downtime, enhancing communications, facilitating information sharing and making sure that your hospital is running as efficiently as possible through process and system implementation.
How do many IT teams struggle?
It is often difficult to align IT investments (where your money goes to IT initiatives and projects) to your hospital’s overall goals and objectives. Often the IT team simply is focused on keeping your organization running and either doesn’t have the time or capacity to direct IT resources towards hospital-wide initiatives or goals. One of the biggest challenges within IT is finding a balance between what technology solutions will keep your hospital running smoothly and how to implement or configure technology that helps you meet long term goals.
Summing up what is Information Technology? With information as a pricy commodity nowadays, IT teams are an essential component to your hospital operations. Information Technology is the vehicle that is responsible for storing and transporting all of the information within your hospital from one place to another.
Why doesn’t Information Technology encompass security?
While it’s important that IT teams appreciate how security works and are able to implement specific security measures, oversight of cybersecurity often far-exceeds day to day information technology. Good cybersecurity engages IT teams to make sure that process and policy is consistently being followed across your organization. But cybersecurity teams should be expertly focused at identifying dangers or threats within your hospital network and protecting your IT infrastructure, IT systems—basically everything that falls within Information Technology from being vulnerable to cyberattacks and data breaches.
The role of a cybersecurity specialist is to protect your hospital’s sensitive and confidential information from getting in the wrong hands. For a hospital like yours to fall victim to a cyberattack would certainly be a devastating blow to both your organization and to the patients you serve.
Because of the gravity behind cybersecurity threats, information security specialists and experts focus on eliminating or mitigating your risks of cyber events and attacks to ensure that your data remains secure, help keep continuity in your organization in the event something happens to your data, and makes certain that the data you are storing has not been tampered with and reflects original work done by your doctors, nurses and medical teams.
A good healthcare cybersecurity specialist will be able to identify, understand and resolve configurations and vulnerabilities on your network before they become exploits in real-life attacks. They communicate with your IT Support team to devise integrated solutions to ensure that your hospital doesn’t fall victim to attacks.
Think of your IT Support as red blood cells. Just as your entire body needs oxygen to function, so too your hospital needs information to be transmitted constantly. Radiology needs to send images across your network so that your ER doc can evaluate and diagnose an emergency. Medical billing needs information from charges accumulated in patient charts to make sure your hospital gets reimbursed and paid for resources you’ve used. A nurse needs to get accurate test results assigned to the correct patient from the lab to ensure treatments are working. Everyone needs information and IT is responsible for giving people access to this information.
But if your body only had red blood cells, would that be enough to keep it healthy? Maybe if we lived in very sterile environments with no risk of getting an infection, we’d be set having red blood cells streaming throughout our body.
But since we live in a world with risks—viruses, bacteria, parasites—we need more than just red blood cells circulating throughout our bodies. Our bodies need something that monitors for things that shouldn’t be there—and something that will make sure that we get rid of them. White blood cells.
Hospital networks need something very similar to white blood cells: cybersecurity specialists.
Similar to white blood cells, cybersecurity specialists help eliminate your hospital’s risk of getting infected in a world where cybercrime is on the rise and cyber criminals are looking for any way they can to break into healthcare networks to either steal or ransom your data.
Cybersecurity experts help your hospital identify, understand, resolve and reconfigure security vulnerabilities before they lead to major cyberattacks or data breaches. They essentially are quarantining problems and prioritizing those problems so that your hospital is able to avoid being a cyber target.
By implementing security controls, communicating new or changed security policies, and integrating security with information systems, healthcare cybersecurity teams ensure that your hospital continues to run without risk of infection. They make sure that the information you’ve committed to keeping safe remains safe—inside and outside of your network.
The bottom line: most hospitals have professional IT support on staff that make sure day to day problems are getting solved and that their teams have access to the information they need. The problem is that these teams are experts at making sure data flows within your network, NOT how to prevent bad guys from getting in or exploiting your network.
Are you making sure your hospital’s network and data is protected from cybercriminals? Contact Us TODAY for a free ransomware assessment.
