Safeguarding Sensitive Data: Five Cybersecurity Best Practices for Healthcare BPO
If you have interacted at all lately with your primary care physician’s office, you know healthcare has gone digital. Check-in, billing, and queries about insurance and records access are almost all handled through an online portal. Physicians are even more likely to be carrying a tablet than a chart.
While nurses and patients everywhere are glad they no longer need to decipher a doctor’s handwriting, the move toward digital comes with risks, of course. Cybersecurity is a growing concern, especially since the sensitive nature of healthcare data makes the industry a prime target. In fact, according to IBM’s 2024 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, there was a 71% increase year-over-year increase in cyberattacks that used stolen or compromised credentials.
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services can help manage critical functions such as revenue cycle management, coding, credentialing verification, and more while making sure your system is secure.
Below are five key practices to boost your security. But, first, let’s discuss the unique cybersecurity challenges related to healthcare BPO.
The unique cybersecurity challenges in healthcare BPO
Healthcare providers face unique cybersecurity challenges due to the sensitive and regulated nature of the data they handle. The need to comply with regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) adds an extra layer of complexity since firms must ensure all data processing and storage practices maintain patient privacy.
Additionally, a data breach in the healthcare sector can lead to severe legal penalties, substantial financial losses, and long-lasting reputational damage. Therefore, BPO providers and healthcare providers must prioritize cybersecurity to protect not only their clients’ data, but also their own business integrity.
In other words: when using BPO services, the need for secure data transmission between healthcare providers and BPO firms is paramount.
Best practices for cybersecurity in healthcare BPO
To address these challenges, healthcare BPO providers should implement a comprehensive set of cybersecurity best practices designed to safeguard sensitive data.
These practices include at least five must haves:
Data encryption: Encrypting data both at rest and in transit is essential to prevent unauthorized access. Encryption means even if data is intercepted or accessed by unauthorized individuals, it is unreadable and unusable.
Access control: Access controls specify who can view private data and what software can be used while viewing it. Companies should only assign access if it’s necessary for an employee to do their job. Radiant Healthcare goes a step further for its clients and limits internet access as well as downloading capabilities to minimize risk.
Auditing and monitoring: A security camera is useless if nobody is watching it. Continuous monitoring of systems and regular security audits are crucial for detecting and responding to potential threats in real-time. Comprehensive monitoring protocols can identify unusual activity, such as unauthorized logins. Regular audits help ensure security measures are up-to-date and effective and provide an opportunity to address vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
Employee Training: According to the 2021 HIMSS Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey, phishing was the entry point for 71% of the most significant security incidents. In other words: cybersecurity is not just a technical consideration, it’s a human one. Employees should be trained to recognize common social engineering tactics. A well-informed workforce is a critical line of defense against cyberattacks.
Response and recovery: Planning for the worst ensures organizations can minimize data loss and get back up and running faster. Incident response protocols help identify, contain, and remediate security breaches swiftly while also keeping secure backups of data. Proper backups also reduce the damage caused by natural disasters. By prioritizing response and recovery, healthcare organizations demonstrate a commitment to safeguarding sensitive information and maintaining continuity in critical operations.
Choosing the right BPO partner for secure healthcare data management
In today’s digital age, maintaining proper digital security is essential for healthcare providers. With the sensitive nature of healthcare data and the increasing threats from cyberattacks, it is crucial to ensure your organization and any third parties it works with have the necessary measures in place to protect patient and provider information.
While these five steps are essential, the list above is by no means exhaustive.
Radiant Healthcare maintains 32 policies for security and compliance. By partnering with a BPO provider like Radiant that implements robust cybersecurity practices, healthcare providers can confidently focus on their primary mission: delivering quality patient care.
