April 29, 2024
Just as personal hygiene habits like hand washing can prevent illness, good cyber hygiene can reduce susceptibility to cyber attacks and protect sensitive information. Here’s a list of healthy cyber habits and tools MEDENT recommends to prevent data breaches and safeguard patient information:
Security Plan
Develop a comprehensive security plan for your network and devices, including firewalls, email spam, and virus and ransomware protections. Review this annually with your IT security vendor to identify vulnerabilities, assess threats and evaluate the effectiveness of existing security controls.
Cyber Insurance
Practices should consider investing in cyber insurance, a specialty insurance product intended to protect businesses from Internet-based risks.
Regular Staff Training
Did you know all MEDENT employees participate in annual security training in addition to HIPAA training? We also send frequent reminders to our staff to help them recognize and avoid phishing emails and malicious links.
In addition to annual security training with your IT company, you can review MEDENT’s video on ransomware with employees and learn how you can protect yourself from a security breach.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Consider implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) to add an extra layer of security to accounts.
MEDENT offers Two-Step Verification for individual users, select users or all users at your practice when logging into MEDENT.
IT Company
MEDENT is your EHR system, not your IT company. It is important to have experienced staff outside of MEDENT assigned to the development, execution and monitoring of your Security Plan.
Disaster Recovery Plan/Incident Response Plan
Unfortunately, hackers are getting more and more sophisticated, and sometimes breaches happen. We suggest working with your IT company on a plan to make sure your business can continue operating with minimal losses in the event of a cyber threat or breach. Clearly establish and communicate procedures for detecting, reporting, containing and recovering from data breaches and other security incidents.
Strong Password Policies
In addition to MEDENT’s Password Rules, practices should enforce strong password policies that require employees to create and update complex passwords. You may also want to have a password recovery policy in place.
As a reminder, MEDENT is an EHR and Practice Management system, not an IT security vendor. As such, we are responsible for maintaining secure MEDENT software and HIPAA-compliant connections with external MEDENT interfaces as well as performing server operating system patches, some basic firewall and antivirus protections and backup monitoring. We are not responsible for helping practices develop, execute or maintain their own security policies and procedures.
Check out Episode 5 of MEDENT Minutes to hear from our own cybersecurity experts:
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