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.

What does work look like post-COVID-19?

Even before 2020, the office environment was changing. You could see patients anywhere you had internet access. You could update patient files from your phone just as easily as sitting behind the desk in your office.

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.

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.

According to the Information Systems and Control Association (ISACA), security culture is defined as:

"a pattern of behaviors, beliefs, assumptions, attitudes, and ways of doing things around the information security within an organization."

It impacts an organization’s knowledge base and perspective about the way they make decisions on everything:

Your BYOD (bring your own device) policy
Your patch policy
Your hiring policy for the IT department
Your purchasing policy for updating systems and technology

What does your security policy say about you?

The real purpose of creating a security culture

Why should you concern yourself with increasing security culture in your practice? Common sense says it’s to make technology more secure.

Phishing is getting a lot more sophisticated. 

A Data Breach Report by Verizon showed that 23 percent of all recipients who received a phishing email opened them, and 11 percent clicked on malicious attachments even after opening and reading these deceptive emails.

It sounds like something straight out of the box office; a cybercriminal is out to get you and your data. Yet it might be more real than you anticipate.

Information is the new currency. As long as you’re producing data, there will be someone who wants it for nefarious reasons.

Here in the United States, we’re working diligently to build a highly interoperable EHR system that keeps patients safer, healthier. But we aren’t a local economy anymore.

Every day, US citizens fly all over the world. They receive medical attention while traveling for business and on vacation.

Imagine a technical tool that can predict what ails you. It peruses the charts and information a doctor creates as a part of the electronic health record, looking for anomalies as it goes. Then it makes predictions, hinting to all those who review it where the problems might lie.

It’s fun to play with new toys. And a trip to any store, even the hardware store, can find you rushing home with your bag of goodies. 

IoT gadgets are hard to resist. Can they really become smarter as you use them? Can you control things with just a touch of a button? 

When you find something you like to use at home, it only makes sense you bring it into the office.