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Tips For Keeping Your Data Secure In The Medical Field

29 April 2016 by Edward Smythe

If you run a medical facility, you want to make sure that you continue to comply with the HIPAA guidelines set by the US government to keep the medical information of each individual patient private and secure. You will need to do this by taking appropriate security measures in all parts of your data collection, from entering the data in to storing it in the cloud or in offsite servers. Here are some security tips.

1. Enforce Smart Password Policy

Your first step is to make sure that everyone entering the data is not accidentally leaving backdoors that intruders could use to get the data. The easiest way to make sure that your data is protected by those entering it and accessing it is to enforce smart password policy. You know that the most efficient way to keep your data secure against hackers is to have a password that is strong against brute force attacks, meaning that there are a large number of characters in general and that the password is not only made up of letters or numbers. However, you also don't want your employees to have to create such convoluted passwords that they are unable to remember them and resort to writing them down on paper and storing them somewhere.

You can solve all of your problems by making sure that all passwords are reasonably secure or randomly assigned, and by ensuring that your employees don't create passwords that are easy to crack. Then, you have each employee memorize his or her password as part of standard training, keeping a master file of all passwords encrypted in a central location so that, should an employee forget his or her password, he or she will be able to recover it. Finally, ensure that the physical security of your data center is secure because the strongest passwords in the world will not prevent someone from physically taking a hard drive. 

2. Use End-to-End Encryption

Next, you want to hire the services of a data masking center, like Trial Vault International Inc, that will perform end-to-end encryption on the medical data of your patients. This will render the data unreadable to anyone who might be reading transmissions through your wireless signal. It will also make it very difficult for anyone to read the data should they manage to break into your storage cloud. This will allow you to ensure that your patients' data remains secure.

For more information, talk to a company that specializes in data masking services.

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