Healthcare leaders have never been in a better position to improve their security posture. With more executive support for cybersecurity and a clear mandate to upgrade digital defenses, it is the perfect moment to protect patient data and reinforce your approach to risk management.
But what exactly should leaders focus on – and how can you make the most of this opportunity?
This article explores the “80/20 rule” of healthcare cybersecurity. These are three key factors that have a disproportionate impact on your overall risk and security posture, equipping security leaders to allocate their budgets to the activities that will maximize improvements in 2025.
3 Ways to Radically Reduce Data Security Risks in 2025
Our experience helping 100s of healthcare organizations develop robust data security suggests most organizations can achieve 80% of the improvements they need through three core steps:
1. Improve Risk Visibility
Enhanced visibility of your attack surface and risk data can transform how healthcare organizations approach data security. Rather than operating in silos and dealing with threats piecemeal, a complete view of organization-wide risk enables more proactive, targeted, and effective remediation.
Our experience helping leaders centralize their cybersecurity assessment data and develop a cohesive risk register has revealed several clear benefits:
- Faster Risk Identification: Security blind spots are far easier to find and fix when your data is not stored across multiple disparate systems. You can evaluate your security posture against established best practices and guidelines like the NIST CSF – and locate vulnerabilities before they turn into serious threats.
- Improved Risk Prioritization: Your organization may uncover multiple vulnerabilities that cannot all be remediated at once. Organization-wide visibility helps to compare “apples to oranges” and understand which areas require the most urgent attention. Given that 60% of data breaches in healthcare are caused by known vulnerabilities that weren’t patched in time, better prioritization could dramatically reduce the risk of a breach.
- Stronger Risk Remediation: A clear view of organization-wide risk makes executive buy-in easier to win and unlocks larger budgets for remediation. Security leaders find it easier to quantify the potential threat of non-action when their risk is clearly ranked and easy to present to the board.
As a result, we recommend that every security leader take the following steps to increase risk visibility in 2025:
- Evaluate Risk: Run comprehensive risk assessments to establish your existing posture. The strain this places on security teams can be mitigated through process automation and third-party support to generate reliable questionnaires for third-party vendors, complete complicated assessment documentation, and manage the large volume of data produced.
- Centralize Data: Eliminate data silos and establish a single cohesive source for all security information. This will help to increase transparency, assign clear responsibility for managing data security risks, and unlock a clearer view of organization-wide vulnerabilities.
2. Increase Compliance Training
Employee behavior is a major contributor to data security, with some studies claiming 88% of data breaches are the result of employee error. Most organizations, therefore, immediately benefit from increasing the frequency of their compliance and cybersecurity training – or simply ensuring there is a regular cadence to training.
This does not have to be a resource-intensive measure; online, self-directed learning geared specifically to HIPAA requirements is now available. Employees can learn at their own pace, with customizable curricula based on specific roles and requirements. Progress can then be monitored and used to make targeted interventions when extra support is needed.
More extensive training is not just about reducing risk – it also contributes to a “culture of compliance.” Employees are more aware of compliance during their day-to-day workflow and likely more mindful of factors such as phishing attacks, data handling safeguards, and data disposal protocol – all of which contribute to avoiding data breaches.
3. Consistent Remediation
Many organizations treat remediation as the final part of their annual HIPAA security risk assessment process, but our experts recommend scaling these efforts to run year-round. Not only does this help tackle the full range of vulnerabilities within a complex organization, but it also means novel threats are dealt with more quickly.
The benefits of more frequent remediation efforts cannot be overstated. For example, Microsoft reports that 99% of hacked accounts lack multi-factor authentication (MFA). Because hacking is a major source of data breaches, implementing wide-scale adoption of MFA can drastically reduce the risk of data breaches.
Security leaders can kickstart this process through two steps:
- Map your existing vulnerabilities and create a timeline for remediation. This will help quantify the impact remediation can have, illustrate what remediation will involve, and build a clear business case for increasing the frequency and extent of remediation efforts.
- Establish a task force responsible for ensuring remediation is ongoing and robust. This should ideally include individuals from multiple areas of the business, helping to foster cross-departmental collaboration and making clear that remediation and data security are relevant to all parties.
Taken together, these steps will dramatically improve your cybersecurity – and there has never been a better time to get started.
Scale Your Data Security Efforts with Intraprise Health
Intraprise Health helps healthcare organizations of all sizes plan, implement, and monitor better data security measures. This includes:
- Innovative software to centralize risk data and automate assessment processes
- Expert services to scale and improve your remediation efforts
- Outsourced staffing support such as virtual CISOs (vCISO) to meet requirements without hiring full-time workers
Want to explore how we can help you avoid data breaches this year?
