With the threat from cybercriminals growing and the cost of breaches rising, healthcare cybersecurity is no longer just a question of compliance – it is a matter of patient and organizational safety.
This Week Health recently brought George Pappas, Intraprise Health CEO, and Scott Mattila, Intraprise Health CSO, onto their podcast to discuss the company’s mission to help healthcare organizations adopt more robust cybersecurity measures.
3 Insights to Drive Stronger Healthcare Cybersecurity
While the discussion covered a wide range of issues, we have boiled it down to three essential takeaways:
1. Cybersecurity Frameworks Are Crucial for Healthcare
Intraprise Health was born from a simple insight: best-in-class cybersecurity was too difficult for most healthcare organizations to achieve. This idea was sparked by the HITRUST framework, which few healthcare organizations had adopted – despite the reverence with which it was held.
“HITRUST has always been known as an extremely valuable security framework,” George explains. “But it’s very rigorous, and it takes an awfully long time to get certified.”
The company saw an opportunity to make the certification more accessible to healthcare organizations. With a combination of automation software and guided services, Intraprise Health set about making the HITRUST framework easier to adopt for healthcare organizations that often lacked both the cybersecurity experience and budgets required to meet such exacting standards.
This became the founding vision for the company. It has been the basis for an ever-expanding range of software and services that would provide similar solutions for everything from HIPAA compliance and third-party risk management to the NIST cybersecurity framework.
2. Risk Management Must Be Proactive
While recent high-profile breaches have led healthcare executives to put a greater emphasis on cybersecurity, this sudden increased attention to security may risk missing the bigger picture.
“Operational leaders’ biggest challenge is going beyond the current moment to be proactive, not reactive,” Scott says.
The difficulty is often securing leadership buy-in so security teams can implement monitoring solutions to stay ahead of the changing threat landscape – something Intraprise Health specializes in making possible.
3. Fragmented Data Leads to a Lack of Ownership and Transparency
Integrated risk management (IRM) is an essential next step for most healthcare cybersecurity programs.
“Providers need to see all information about a patient’s health to treat them,” Scott says. “And the same is true of risk: risk data needs to be brought together.”
However, this is not just about improving the decision-making processes – it is also about instilling ownership. With data stored in various spreadsheets and spread across multiple disparate systems, security teams become frustrated with a lack of clear accountability.
Scott describes this as the “cyber risk workflow,” arguing that a unified approach to risk empowers organizations to streamline these workflows – and ensure every threat has a clear owner within the security team.
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