When running an allied health practice, patients will always be your top priority. Ensuring their security while providing high-quality care is a difficult balancing act to begin with – but add IT into the mix, and it begins to feel impossible. Most practices have a basic understanding of HIPAA, but this doesn’t necessarily translate to in-depth knowledge of why IT compliance matters and how to properly maintain it. As the allied health sector becomes increasingly digitised, this problem is only exacerbated – staff are working with more advanced technology, without the expertise needed to ensure compliance.
The good news is that you don’t have to figure it out on your own. While IT creates compliance issues, it can just as easily help you solve them. The right solutions make all the difference between your practice barely staying afloat, and thriving.
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What Does IT Compliance Actually Mean?
The term might make it sound complicated – but at its core, compliance is simply the process of adhering to rules, regulations, and standards. This might include:
- National laws
- International laws
- Industry-specific standards
- Cyber security frameworks
- Internal company policies
For healthcare and allied health, the goal is generally to protect patient data. This information in particular is of a highly sensitive nature, which is extremely valuable to threat actors. Once they have their hands on it, they can either sell it for a very high price or, worse still, use it to launch even more harmful cyber-attacks. They may even decide to do both. Healthcare IT also contains many vulnerabilities that are often not addressed, due to the time involved in training, implementation, and maintenance. This creates a perfect storm that has resulted in health service providers being the most commonly targeted sector in Australia.
Compliance helps address this problem through a number of strategies:
- Protecting patient data
- Ensuring secure communications
- Keeping accurate records
- Maintaining transparency
- Preventing unauthorised access to sensitive information
Over time, this reduces the risk of sensitive data being stolen or disrupted, protecting not only your patients but your own best interests.
Compliance and IT: Why Your Technology Matters
Technology is both the location your data is stored in and the vulnerability that can be exploited. Instead of needing to gain access to a physical location, which is much more difficult, modern threat actors can access your entire organisation with just a few clicks. Under these circumstances, cyber security is no longer an optional way of addressing vague, future concerns. It is a necessity to protect your clinic from very real, present threats.
As it becomes an integral piece of security, your IT likewise becomes a bigger part of compliance. For individuals, data breaches are now a highly pressing concern, putting pressure on governments around the world to respond. The result is rapidly tightening laws designed to more carefully control the collection, use, and disposal of digital data. If your IT isn’t compliant with these new rules, neither is your practice.
Common Cyber Threats Facing Health Service Providers
Some of the most prevalent threats that your practice is likely to face include:
Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware has long been the scourge of businesses everywhere. As the name suggests, attackers encrypt or steal your data, holding it hostage and quite literally demanding a ransom payment. This tactic is particularly dangerous for healthcare providers for one reason: The more sensitive the data, the more damaging a ransomware attack is. In the worst-case scenario, those responsible can halt patient care entirely, creating a sense of urgency that makes your practice more likely to pay up – which does not guarantee that they won’t carry out their threats anyway.
Phishing Scams
Social engineering attacks, such as phishing scams, are often used as the first step towards a more serious threat (for example, ransomware). They involve the use of psychological manipulation to extract information, which might include anything from login credentials to patient records, or to download malware onto your devices. Because human behaviour is fairly predictable and most people will react to certain triggers in a similar way, this strategy is extremely effective for threat actors, making it very widely used.
Insider Threats
It’s easy to forget that not all threats necessarily come from outside your practice. Sometimes, poor data handling practices are all it takes to cause a security breach. Devices are lost or stolen, staff walk away while logged into accounts, privacy policies aren’t understood or followed consistently, and information can be accidentally – or in rare cases, intentionally – leaked. In an environment where employees are regularly tired and stressed out, these mistakes are more likely to occur.
Unsecured Medical Devices
Medical devices and other healthcare-specific technologies, paradoxically, are often not built with security in mind. They may lack internal cyber security features entirely, making them difficult to properly protect. This makes them an easy attack vector through which threat actors can reach the rest of your practice.
The Rules Your Practice Must Follow
To navigate compliance, you first need to understand what the rules actually are. This can be easier said than done: laws are increasingly globalised, rather than being restricted to each nation, and they change regularly to meet the rate of technological advancement. To address that challenge, here is a brief list of some of the most relevant laws that govern your practice:
- The Australian Privacy Act: This is the main law governing data security in Australia. All organisations that handle health data are subject to this regulation, which mandates transparency and accountability. Under the Privacy Act, you must obtain permission for data collection when practical to do so, handle it with care, and dispose of it once no longer needed. Amendments were introduced late last year that also require you to ensure any overseas recipients of data are compliant.
- The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA): HIPAA is odd, in the sense that most providers know the basics and yet few fully understand it. Australian practices commonly believe that it doesn’t even apply to them, which is a mistake. The truth is that any organisation handling the healthcare data of US citizens must obey HIPAA compliance IT requirements. Your biggest concern here is the Security Rule, which requires that you take “reasonable action” to protect data while maintaining its integrity, accuracy, and confidentiality.
- The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): The GDPR is another international law that still applies to you – specifically, a European law. Any organisation handling the data of EU citizens, under this regulation, must provide transparency and security for any information they collect. The GDPR is also known for its “right to be forgotten” provision – individuals have a legal right to ask that their stored data be given to them or deleted entirely.
There may be other laws that your practice is subject to, depending on various factors, but these are the three most important. The regulations listed above will have a significant impact on your future.
IT Compliance Frameworks
While not mandated outright, it’s also highly recommended that you comply with at least one or two of the various cyber security frameworks available. These provide clear data protection guidelines that, if followed correctly, will also help you reach legal compliance. Some examples include:
- NIST: A global framework designed to ensure robust cyber security.
- The Essential 8: A set of controls built by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) to provide every organisation with realistic, achievable security.
- ISO 27001: A universal standard for information security, which also comes with a certificate organisations can earn.
- The CIS Controls: A set of 18 critical security controls that protect your practice from every angle.
What Happens if I Don’t Comply?
It is a grave error to underestimate the importance of compliance. Data security is taken more seriously than ever before, due to the level of harm a breach can cause. The consequences of non-compliance can be severe and far-reaching:
- Financial Penalties: Substantial fines can be imposed if you’re caught failing to properly protect patient data. In fact, last year’s amendment to the Australian Privacy Act both increased the fines and decreased the threshold required to earn one. You can now receive a harsher punishment for less.
- Legal Action: Not only could governments seek legal action against you after a data breach, but individuals may as well. New statutory torts in Australia have granted both patients and regulatory bodies additional power to do this.
- Operational Disruption: When a data breach strikes, some amount of downtime is inevitable. The amount and severity will depend on many factors, including how much information was accessed, what it was, and whether it was used in an additional attack. In the worst-case scenario, your entire clinic could be out of action for hours or even days.
- Reputational Damage: Trust is everything for allied health practices, and news spreads faster than most diseases. If the public finds out that you failed to comply with rules designed for their safety, that trust will shatter in an instant. The end result? Patients go elsewhere, looking for a provider who takes security more seriously.
These consequences can cripple your practice’s ability to operate efficiently and legally. Worse still, they could follow you for years or decades. Once trust has been lost it is all but impossible to regain.
How IT Solutions Simplify Compliance
All of this might make compliance sound like a frightening challenge to overcome, but it doesn’t have to be. A multitude of modern IT solutions exist to help simplify and streamline compliance, providing several key benefits along the way:
1. Stronger Security
The good news about compliance is that it typically only requires cyber security measures your practice should already be using. This means any IT solution that improves your defences will automatically bring you closer to full compliance, while simultaneously reducing your risk of cyber-attacks.
2. Automation of Routine Tasks
Many compliance tasks are repetitive, time-consuming, and boring. Many of these can be automated with the right technology, allowing employees to focus on patient care rather than on tedious security and compliance activities. Automation also significantly reduces human error.
3. Consistency
Solutions such as compliance management software help ensure a consistent approach across all systems and as your practice grows. This in turn prevents gaps from forming that could cause trouble during an audit.
4. Real-Time Monitoring
Continuous security and compliance monitoring costs you, in both money and the time of your staff. Technology provides an alternative, allowing you to monitor systems 24/7 without the expenses involved.
5. Simplified Documentation and Reporting
Documentation of compliance activities is easier than ever before thanks to various software solutions and AI-powered tools. These clear, comprehensive reports simplify the auditing process, making it easier to prove your compliance when necessary.
Best IT Solutions to Address Your Compliance Needs
Here are just some examples of solutions that can make compliance a much easier prospect:
Automated Data Encryption
There are many platforms and solutions available that will automatically encrypt your data, particularly during transit. When data is encrypted, it becomes completely unreadable until decrypted using the correct key. This reduces risk by ensuring that even when compromised, none of this information can be used for nefarious purposes. This is one of the most effective strategies you can use to mitigate ransomware attacks.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
MFA requires multiple forms of verification before granting access to accounts and data. When a username and password are no longer enough to log in, social engineering attacks and even human error become far less of a concern. Anyone who doesn’t have the correct authentication won’t be able to get in – and better still, most MFA will automatically notify the account holder of any login attempts, informing you immediately of the potential breach.
AI Threat Monitoring, Detection, and Reporting
AI is good for more than drafting emails. Using advanced behavioural analytics, it can independently detect and react to anomalies that might represent an attack in progress. Many programs will even generate a detailed report of the incident, helping you demonstrate your compliance activities in the event of an audit.
Corporate Compliance and Oversight (CCO) Tools
CCO tools provide a centralised platform from which compliance activities can be automated, tracked, and documented. Rather than simply increasing your security, these solutions focus entirely on simplifying and facilitating compliance activities.
Blockchain Technology
The blockchain is highly valuable for healthcare compliance, due to the secure, immutable records it provides. Once data has been stored inside the blockchain, it can’t be altered, guaranteeing an accurate record.
Solutions That Guarantee Seamless IT Compliance
IT compliance isn’t an afterthought – it should be one of your main concerns as an allied health provider. Adherence to relevant laws and regulations is a crucial activity that, if neglected, can cause long-term harm to your clinic and patients. But it doesn’t have to be difficult. The right solutions, used in the right way, can vastly simplify compliance issues without adding further strain to your existing resources – allowing you to ensure trust for years into the future.
Haven’t found what you’re looking for? Vandros is here to help. We specialise in helping allied health practices streamline their IT, beef up their security, and tackle compliance with ease. Explore Vandros, and learn how we can help.
