Have you made significant changes to your practice based on HIPAA laws? Think your data is safe enough?
Think again.
There’s a new kid in town - CCPA - the latest in laws designed to protect data.
You may have heard about CCPA - California Consumer Privacy Act - which went into law on January 1st.
VPNs - virtual private networks - are designed to give people working remotely a secure connection into the company network. It creates a “tunnel” from wherever the worker accesses it, directly into the company’s database, usually via an internet connection.
Smart voice technology has the promise of helping senior centers out in many ways. Thanks to the Internet of Things, smart technology is taking over just about everything and giving options for more independence.
The Amazon Echo and Google Home offer virtual assistance that can be placed bedside or anywhere in a room.
Imagine meeting someone new in a professional environment. You have a friendly dinner. You exchange phone numbers. You send and receive a message or two.
And then things start to happen.
Unfortunately, being one of the top business people in the world can’t stop a hacker if they want in.
What resolutions have you made for this New Year? To get more organized? Simplify and automate tasks? Or maybe get rid of things that have been cluttering up your office space for years?
Ringing in the New Year always brings on a sense of starting over.
Where could a cybercriminal penetrate your practice? What assets would they hit? What systems would they breach?
The term “attack surface” can be defined as all of your IT assets, whether they are secure or vulnerable, you’re aware of them or not, they’re on-site or in the cloud, third-party or your own.
Healthcare organizations are aggressively changing out expensive, outdated systems in favor of more flexible cloud-based applications. It just makes good business sense. Often, you get a far better product at a fraction of the price. And because you’re partnering with a third-party service, you don’t have the same stringent security issues you once faced when everything was in-house.
Successful organizations share a common trait of being successful planners and strategizers. Management and employees alike all share a common goal and know what it takes to get there.
Of course, you can’t have a successful organization without great customer service.
How many people in your practice take work home with them? How many of them work remotely, at least part of the time?
This probably comes as no surprise to you, but the way people are working is changing … a lot. According to Global Workplace Analytics:
The work-at-home environment has grown by 173 percent since 2005
4.7 million employees work from home at least half of the time
40 percent of US employers offer flexible workplace options
That might be where we stand today, but the same study suggests that the work-at-home environment is going to continue to increase at breakneck speed:
50 percent of the US workforce currently have jobs that can be performed at least partially remotely
80 to 90 percent of US workforce would like to work remotely, at least part of the time
Security is hard enough when everyone is in the same working environment.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about as consumers, medical identity theft is on the rise. The smarter we as individuals get about protecting our own security, the more tools cybercriminals use to capture the data they want. It’s a game of cat and mouse that we’ll invariably keep playing for the foreseeable future.