Ramping Up Security for Healthcare IT

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, testing every system, component and process in healthcare facilities, IT departments are under tremendous pressure to ensure that their organizations’ technology performs as required. But beyond that, they must ensure that the systems do not become victims of cyberattacks.

Healthcare organizations invest significant resources in cybersecurity. And as with their counterparts in other industries, healthcare IT leaders know their jobs involve highly sensitive data that, if compromised, could jeopardize staff and customer privacy. But clinical organizations also know cybersecurity failures could affect the physical safety and even the lives of patients, according to HealthTech. 

This heightened risk requires intense scrutiny, so healthcare leaders often turn to external organizations to better understand their current risk and identify opportunities for improvement. These independent assessments can identify issues that might have gone unnoticed, according to HealthTech. Three types of cybersecurity assessments organizations can pursue to protect their networks, applications and operating protocols. 

Consider network assessments. Healthcare IT networks are complex and tend to expand quickly. Network security assessments ferret out these issues. The review begins with automated scanning tools that identify active devices on a network and probe them for vulnerabilities. Scanners can detect outdated operating systems and applications, missing patches, non-secure configurations, default accounts and other security issues that might tempt a hacker.

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