The healthcare industry is experiencing a significant surge in data, driven by several factors. Adoption of disparate digital technologies by the healthcare organizations such as telemedicine, telehealth, wearable devices, smart monitors, connected ER solutions and above all EHRs (Electronic Health Records) force them to draw their attention towards data security, data privacy and data governance. 

Scenarios of data surge in the healthcare sector majorly revolves around: 

• Big Data Revolution: Over the last decade, pharmaceutical companies have aggregated years of research and development data into medical databases. Simultaneously, payors and providers have digitized patient records. 

• Fiscal Concerns and Incentives: It is driving the demand for big-data applications. For example – healthcare expenses now represent 17.6% of GDP in the United States—$600 billion more than the expected benchmark for a nation of its size and wealth. 

• Clinical Data: Medical Practitioners are increasingly adopting evidence-based medicine, digital consultation and systematically reviewing clinical data to make treatment decisions based on the best available information. 

Reasons behind Proliferation of Digital Data in Healthcare Industry 

The volume of digital data in the healthcare industry is increasing due to several key factors: 

• Electronic Medical Records (EMRs): The widespread adoption of EMRs has led to a significant increase in the amount of digital data generated and stored by healthcare staff. 

• Advanced Medical Imaging: Modern imaging technologies, such as MRI and CT scans, produce large volumes of data. Each patient can generate substantial amounts of imaging data annually. 

• Telemedicine and Remote Monitoring: The rise of telemedicine and remote patient monitoring, especially accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has contributed to the growth of digital health data. 

• Wearable Devices and Health Apps: The increasing use of wearable devices and health apps that track various health metrics (e.g., heart rate, physical activity) adds to the data volume. 

• Government Initiatives: Many governments are promoting digital health initiatives to improve healthcare delivery and patient outcomes, further driving the increase in digital data. 

These factors collectively contribute to the exponential growth of digital data in the healthcare sector. 

Cybersecurity Treats due to Data Surge 

Continuous evolution of cybersecurity in the healthcare industry is a burning topic, especially as digital technologies become increasingly integrated into patient care and well-being. Let us delve into the type of threats faced by healthcare organizations: 

1) Data Breaches: Healthcare providers are increasingly vulnerable to potentially catastrophic ransomware attacks and data breaches. Cybercriminals exploit weaknesses in healthcare systems, demanding payment in exchange for decryption keys to unlock critical files and restore access to vital systems (Ransomware). Hospitals, medical centers, and clinical labs are attractive targets due to the pressure they face to quickly restore critical systems required for patient care. 

2) Protected Health Information (PHI) Theft: The theft of valuable protected health information (PHI) is a growing concern. Cybercriminals exploit patient data for identity theft, accessing expensive healthcare services or filing fraudulent tax returns. Patient care repercussions from cyberattacks can lead to delays in procedures, longer hospital stays, and even increased mortality rates in severe cases. 

3) Challenges Faced by Healthcare Providers: Many healthcare organizations lack sophisticated cybersecurity defenses to address today’s threat landscape. Limited budgets and inadequate resources often leave gaps in their cybersecurity posture. Even outdated IT systems, weak vulnerability management, and patch processes contribute to security flaws that cybercriminals exploit. 

4) Third-Party Risk Management: Not all healthcare providers prioritize and invest enough resources in third-party risk management programs. Cybercriminals can exploit vulnerabilities in commonly used third-party tools, gaining backdoor access to critical systems within the healthcare environment. 

5) Inadequate Preparation for the Future: Organizations must pay closer attention to data privacy, modernize data protection standards, and establish better awareness, detection, and response capabilities for cybersecurity threats. The future of health care involves radically interoperable data, always-on sensors, and prospective and predictive care. 

How does ARCON play a pivotal role in managing healthcare data? 

In a continuously evolving IT landscape in the healthcare sector, managing and storing enterprise data is a challenge for IT administrators. ARCON offers “My Vault” solution that works as a centralized repository to protect, store and share confidential and sensitive health information securely. It allows every user to securely store, access and share critical medical history and patients’ personal information. The source files where this information is stored remain encrypted and can be deleted easily after a preset time. It also controls the end-users’ activities in the health organization based on the pre-configured permissions even at a granular level. 

• ARCON | My Vault helps data management staff with the ability to store healthcare secrets, case histories, confidential files, credentials for accessing medical repositories etc. in a highly secured vault. It also provides administrative users managing servers with the ability to transfer files from one machine to another without having to go through the interactive access in Privileged Access Management. 

• ARCON| My Vault can be deployed as a discrete solution because it can provide role-based access for sharing, downloading, viewing, or transferring files and secrets. My Vault also provides a simple centralized store for large files (including software, patches, etc.) 

• ARCON | My Vault ensures a centralized access framework that helps healthcare staff to share and access critical files uninterruptedly and securely. To ensure the security of the information a step ahead, these files are accessed only by the My Vault users. 

• All the files that are secretly stored in My Vault are accessible only after double authentication of the users with elevated access rights. Not just that, every monitoring of the end-users and authentication mechanisms happens at a granular level. 

• All the uploaded files are deleted automatically after the pre-designated time. As a result, the files remain safe from being accessed by irrelevant or unauthorized users. 

Conclusion 

ARCON | My Vault has turned out to be an essential information security solution in modern healthcare industry use cases. It offers a centralized repository to protect, store and share confidential medical information and clinical secrets. 

Amid rapid adoption of digital technologies, vast digital healthcare ecosystems have sprung up. However, the security posture to protect digital information needs to be more robust in the wake of rising cybersecurity incidents. Digital transformation has meant that there are large lakes of data — patients’ health records, R&D related data, Intellectual Property, personal health data ( healthcare devices that interacts with cloud-based servers to store and process health information) – stored in the public cloud, private cloud and outsourced to managed service providers. So, access control vulnerabilities at any of these data storage platforms can result in data breaches. 

And the challenges to protect healthcare data have increased in the last 12 months. The  healthcare industry faced unprecedented challenges after the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world. 

The Ponemon Institute and Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report says that the healthcare industry experiences more data breaches compared to any other industry across the globe. The latest report reveals that more than 15 million health records have been compromised till date.

Why is the Healthcare Industry prone to cyber risks?

The healthcare industry is a treasure trove of personal data, medical records, and diagnostic information along with critical third-party data. Large hospital chains, pharma MNCs, pathology labs, virtual healthcare chains,  global R&D companies focused on life-saving drugs/ vaccines are the prime targets for cyber threats.

Vulnerability 1: Critical applications that store and process patients’ healthcare data are highly vulnerable to illegitimate access. Cyber incidents happen when there is a lack of rule-and rule-based access to mission-critical applications.  Besides, endpoint privileges are easily available and access credentials are not changed while the authentication process is weak. And since this data is sold on the market, it incentivizes cybercriminals. 

Vulnerability 2: Many healthcare organizations use third-party infrastructure to manage their 24X7 medical services. It is not uncommon to find several large healthcare chains outsource healthcare-related data for storage and processing work. 

The applications and databases require 24X7 access since the attendants serving the maternity ward or emergency ward might require emergency access even in the wee hours of midnight.

In this scenario, IT risks double up if the organizations do not have any mechanism to monitor who is accessing what and for which purpose. Any unauthorized access can be catastrophic if there is no mechanism to detect and identify end-user anomalies on time. 

Vulnerability 3: When there is an outbreak of a deadly disease, bio-scientists work day-in and day-out to identify the pattern of the virus or bacteria and prepare sensitive reports on that. Based on the report, they work on medications or vaccines to rescue the human race. The biological formula of the vaccines and the life-saving drugs are highly case-sensitive and are extremely vulnerable for IT threats. The malefactors that can target these sensitive information can be rogue states, cybercriminals or malicious insiders. 

Safeguarding healthcare information

In all of the above vulnerabilities, poor access control mechanism, absence of governance framework, lack of endpoint privilege management, credential abuse or misuse (especially privilege passwords and keys) often results in illegitimate access to applications and databases. 

Being at the forefront of protecting highly sensitive data, ARCON has been witnessing a very robust demand from the healthcare industry for Privileged Access Management deployments. ARCON | PAM enforces a governance framework that ensures any administrator or privileged user gains access to target systems only after a proper authorization and authentication process. Please read this case study to learn more about how ARCON | PAM is securing critical IT infrastructure of one of the largest healthcare chains in India. 

Conclusion

The healthcare industry grabs news headlines, especially when there are epidemics. While healthcare organizations remain busy with serving mankind, cyber criminals take advantage of the social crisis and sneak into the IT infrastructure loopholes to inflict financial losses and malign goodwill. In the current backdrop, the healthcare industry is facing enormous IT risks. To improve cybersecurity measures in the healthcare industry, organizations need to continuously incorporate, customize and strengthen IT security measures to manage data assets and protect it from all malefactors. 

Healthcare Debacle : – The insider security threat in Healthcare industry

Security breaches in healthcare are a major issue, but not enough attention is being paid to threats from the inside. A vast majority—92%—of healthcare IT decision-makers reported that their organizations are either somewhat or more vulnerable to insider threats, and 49% felt very or extremely vulnerable

According to the healthcare-focused results of the 2015 Vormetric Insider Threat Report (ITR), a full 62% of respondents identified privileged users—those who have access to all resources available from systems they manage—as the most dangerous type of insider. Partners with internal access and contractors ranked second and third, respectively.

The report pointed out that healthcare data has become highly desirable to bad actors, healthcare records selling for tens to hundreds of dollars. That’s much more valuable than credit-card information: US credit card records sell for 50 cents or less. The enormous detail available in patient records is the reason for this, making it possible for criminals to not only apply for credit cards or loans, but to generate large sums from fraudulent medical charges, or even to compromise a patient’s existing financial accounts.

In this position many healthcare industries are constantly faced with rising requirements to meet their security risks and combat constant attacks on their It security structure.

The delivery of health care services—primary care to secondary and tertiary levels of care—is the most visible part of any health care system, both to users and the general public. There are many ways of providing health care in the modern world. The place of delivery may be in the home, the community, the workplace, or in health facilities. The most common way is face-to-face delivery, where care provider and patient see each other ‘in the flesh’. This is what occurs in general medicine in most countries. However, with modern telecommunications technology, in absentia health care is becoming more common. This could be when practitioner and patient communicate over the phone, video conferencing, the internet, email, text messages, or any other form of non-face-to-face communication.

Improving access, coverage and quality of health services depends on the ways services are organized and managed, and on the incentives influencing providers and users. Healthcare administrators are individuals or groups of people who act as the central point of control within hospitals. These individuals may be previous or current clinicians, or individuals with other backgrounds. There are two types of administrators, generalists and specialists. Generalists are individuals who are responsible for managing or helping to manage an entire facility. Specialists are individuals who are responsible for the efficient operations of a specific department such as policy analysis, finance, accounting, budgeting, human resources, or marketing.

These administrators often have direct access to confidential patient information which is stored in their data centers. Healthcare administrators have a dedicated technology support team to manage these data centers and IT for managing the healthcare core infrastructure. Leveraging technology for increasing growth has become a key agenda for healthcare industry over the years. In the recent years Healthcare industry has come under constant cyber-attacks specifically targeting patient’s confidential data. Also with cases of privileged users stealing sensitive data have become widely known healthcare industry has become more vulnerable to breaches than ever before.