Why Do Hackers Love Healthcare Organizations?
Gaps in IT Infrastructure & Security Create the Perfect Ecosystem for Hackers
According to a Bain & Co and KLAS Research Survey - 75% of providers and payers say they increased IT spending over the past year. To mitigate the risk and impact of cyber-attacks while simultaneously improving the integration of current IT applications, many providers are focusing on IT infrastructure and services. In addition to care coordination and utilization management workflows, Payers also want to invest in cybersecurity. Their focus is on claims processing, provider payment tools, modernizing their core administrative processing system infrastructure, and purchasing more payment integrity solutions.
Why Is IT Infrastructure and Security Such a Challenge for Healthcare Organizations?
Per the research survey - 65% of payers cite legacy technology as a key problem. Fragmented, disconnected, and siloed legacy systems create a patchwork of problems. Inefficient workflows create time-consuming, administrative headaches and staff frustration as well as a lack of transparency and governance. To compound the challenges - Legacy systems process large amounts of patient and member personal information from electronic health records, claims, payment records, and more, creating an irresistible breeding ground for cybercriminals and the perfect recipe for disaster for healthcare organizations. System vulnerabilities produce opportunities for phishing, malware, and unpatched systems with weak user credentials. Top threats include flooding a network or server with traffic to make it inaccessible or slow its performance, supply chain attacks, web application attacks, and ransomware.
To adopt a proactive approach and strengthen security measures - clarity is needed to protect internal and external attack areas by having visibility in all data from endpoints, applications, and identity sources across headquarters, data centers, cloud environments, and remote locations. Knowing the threat levels and having monitoring in place across these areas is judicious for maintaining data integrity and system security. Finding simplicity through digital transformation, consolidation, and integration is key to simplifying your security architecture. Data is difficult to leverage when siloed or spread across too many disconnected systems. A disparate approach to prevention, detection, and response adds unnecessary complexity, making it arduous to act rapidly. To protect sensitive patient data and maintain operational continuity, tech transformation enables real-time, enterprise-wide responses. To secure critical operations, prioritized, just-in-time threat detection enables security teams to focus on the most pressing issues and overall response times, which is crucial for identifying and de-escalating incidents.
Safeguarding patient and member information is the number one priority. Modernization efforts are crucial to preventing data leakages and, ultimately, criminal activity.