How to promote accessibility in healthcare cybersecurity

The more accessible healthcare information is, the more value it provides to patients and providers alike. But much of this information is sensitive, privileged or regulated, making it highly vulnerable when traveling in and out of networks. In this guest post, David Wagner, president and CEO of an email security company, details how to promote accessibility in healthcare cybersecurity.

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The healthcare industry suffers a cybersecurity conundrum: While effective healthcare administration depends on the efficient exchange of this information with trusted vendors and other third parties, employees are often a source of security vulnerability.

In fact,almost half of all healthcare breaches in the first half of 2017 were caused by insiders, that concern is justified.

Problem of accessibility in cybersecurity

While the difficulties healthcare organizations face in the cybersecurity realm aren necessarily distinct to that industry, those enterprises are pulled in two very different directions that make their cybersecurity efforts more difficult: patient care and patient protection.

The most important aspect of people lives is their own health and the health of their loved ones. That why the core mission of hospitals, doctors and treatment centers across the country is preserving patient health and foregrounding care. It makes sense IT may be a lower priority for senior leaders. Where budget constraints are a constant concern, those leaders often focus on treatment technologies as opposed to IT, and while that certainly understandable, it unfortunately doesn mitigate the vulnerability such a focus induces.

Yet healthcare organizations do understand the need for more comprehensive cybersecurity. In response, many have implemented protections to address some of the lingering concerns and prevent data breach fallout, such as huge fines, long-term penalties and damaged public trust through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services� �Wall of Shame.� If users aren committed to using those protections consistently, though, they undermine even the best efforts of an organization.

Healthcare employees are already bombarded with user experience� in cybersecurity is a fairly recent one. Older IT systems often require mazes of inputs and commands, all made worse by the fact that legacy systems don receive the updates and support required for today ever-evolving cyberattack landscape. Now, newer tools for cybersecurity are built with the needs of both back-end administrators and front-end users in mind. IT leaders and teams who upgrade their systems can help increase compliance from employees.

Accessibility and technical tools to enhance it are important, but employee buy-in must stay in focus as well. Users should be eager � not just able � to protect data to the fullest extent. When employees understand how catastrophic a breach would be both personally and organizationally, they become more committed to following policies and procedures to the letter. A combination of education, training and testing with easy-to-use next-generation tools will help ensure cybersecurity processes are seamless and applied throughout an information ecosystem, making accessibility standardized, simplified and streamlined.

Zix, a leader in email security, and has more than 25 years of experience in the IT security industry.