Hospitals are merging with other medical facilities. Big labs are acquiring smaller facilities. Mergers and acquisitions in healthcare have grown into a multi-billion dollar industry.

Of course, it’s not just the biggest names in the industry that join forces.

How many employees do you have? Are they trained and performing to the best of their abilities?

Those questions are becoming more challenging to answer. We’re blurring the lines of what work really means.

It might be standing in a room, talking with a patient.

Running a practice means you wear a variety of hats during the day. While you may stick with the medical mindset most of the time, there are days when your business hat must be worn. Those are the days where you make decisions on things like office management, productivity, and security.

As of 2019, an estimated 3.25 billion digital voice assistants are being used around the world. That number is expected to grow to as much as eight billion units by 2023.

That’s billions of opportunities for hackers to pick up your voice, and use it without your knowledge.

One five-minute search online can reveal a plethora of opportunities. Google words like “security” or “compliance” or “cloud-based,” and you’ll quickly fall down a rabbit hole filled with potential.

Invest in this software. No wait, give this one a try.

Every decision you make about systems and production is a delicate balance between convenience and affordability. Spend more, and you might get more features. But if you max out the budget in one area, you might have to cut back in others. And that can mean you except a system that isn’t in your best interest.

It doesn’t seem plausible that a hacker would target Netflix in order to gain access to your EHR database, yet it might be more doable then you think.

It’s called credential stuffing, and it’s becoming a huge problem.

Hackers used to work long, hard hours, trying to break in one account at a time.

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, was enacted in 1996 to improve healthcare coverage across the US. It was designed to:

Ensure employees retained health insurance as they moved between jobs
Made healthcare organizations more accountable for health data, to ensure it remains private and confidential
Help prevent fraud and abuse in healthcare delivery
Simplify the administration of healthcare

Of course, HIPAA wasn’t a cure-all.

Telehealth was growing rapidly prior to 2020. In 2019, the global telehealth market was valued at $45.5 billion. Now, because we’re all a little more digitally savvy and have an increasing demand for virtual meetings, that number is expected to rise to $175.5 billion by 2026.

In the middle of COVID-19, the Office of Civil Rights stated it would not penalize providers for noncompliance issues as they leveraged telehealth strategies during the pandemic.

Many companies are reinventing themselves in the middle of COVID-19. A custom framing company went into the business of producing face shields. Meals on Wheels has scaled its services by as much as 89 percent in a matter of weeks.

Anytime you change your business direction, you open yourself up to new security risks.