Healthcare Data Security - Essay Example

"Healthcare Data Security" is a perfect example of a paper on the health system.
Data security in healthcare today is regarded as one of the essential components in most organizations. A good healthcare security plan should involve measures that prevent access to patient information. Data security has been enhanced by adopting electronic health records (EHR), which has enhanced information storage (Keshta & Odeh, 2020). There are various data security plans that significant health care organizations can use. This research paper aims at providing a health care data security plan that can be used for a primary health care organization. The plan includes securing systems and data, interoperability challenges, and evaluating all the vendor systems. Mitigation strategies after a breach of security violation using the plan will also be discussed in this paper.

In healthcare organizations, firewalls can be adopted as a data security plan as it prevents major security threats and risks. By definition, a firewall is a system designed to avoid unauthorized access to private networks by other internet users (Kruse et al., 2017). In other words, a firewall is used to prevent damage from a cyber-attack. For a successful data security plan using a firewall, one has to ensure that encryption protection is provided both from inside and outside the firewall. Protection of data inside a firewall involves ensuring that data is encrypted in the computer or the servers such as the SSD, SED, or the HDD (O’Dowd, 2017). Therefore, it is significant that significant healthcare organizations should adopt the use of SSD and SED rather than HDD as they make encryption easy and faster, thus improving the system performance. An organization should rarely use the HDD as it is not protected and secured (Alkorbi et al., 2020). SED is significant as they minimize the risk of data loss.

In case the healthcare organization opts for the use of the HDD, they must ensure that the Trusted Computing Group (TGC) opal 2.0 is adopted. Adopting the TGC is significant as it provides that only authorized machines can have access to data and systems, thus enhancing compliance with the health policies, strengthening data security. Through the TGC opal, password recovery becomes possible; there are automatic updates and improved security policy. Vendor systems involve independent software vendors (ISV) that provide the drive security solutions for the SSD/SED. Such vendors include Sophos, WinMagic, McAfee, and Symantec. An organization should therefore consider a 256-bit AES drive.

According to O'Dowd (2017), successful data security plans for healthcare organizations also involve protection outside the firewall. Outside an organization's firewall protection, there stands a risk of breach of data security. For instance, unencrypted thumb drives, USB drives, flash drives, and removable media, among others, pose risks to systems and data in an organization as they are used for data sharing. Despite USB being extremely portable, they can get lost or breached, leading to significant security issues with organizational data.

Prevention of data loss of this kind calls for organizations to have secured and encrypted USB drives such as the data traveler models. Noteworthy, these USB devices contain the following features; antivirus and password protection, 256-bit encryption, wide capacity range, and the ability to be managed remotely. Thus, all healthcare professionals in an organization should use only encrypted USB devices that prevent data loss and data breach. Additionally, these devices can manage threats and reduce the risks associated with the use of unencrypted devices. The use of hardware encryption is significant as it avoids notable attack routes commonly used to attack the systems. Independent Software Vendors (ISV) are used to protect the data by providing endpoint security solutions. Examples of these vendors are McAfee, Symantec, and Sophos, among others.

A firewall in a healthcare organization is prone to attacks from unauthorized users. Therefore, it is essential to be aware of the mitigation strategies that can be used to prevent the violation in case it occurs in the future. For instance, a firewall can prevent attacks such as DDoS, but at times, the firewall becomes overwhelmed by such attacks. To mitigate this problem, an organization should be aware of other cybersecurity service providers who can provide alternatives for protecting the firewall (Sahu & Khare, 2017.). Another prominent method to mitigate an attack on firewalls is deep packet inspection that detects the malware inside or outside a firewall. Another way is to install internal firewalls that can prevent attackers from accessing the data for a second time. With this, attackers can take more time to reach the required data, thus allowing one to take the necessary precautions.

It is also worth noting that healthcare organizations should also enhance the physical security of sensitive information that might not be stored in electronic health care records. Therefore, organizations should ensure that security personnel maintains the security of information through the use of adequately locked file cabinets and doors. Security cameras should also be installed in these organizations to enhance physical security. Access to IT server rooms should only be from authorized individuals. Conclusively, healthcare organizations should consider the best data security plan that best fits their data security needs. Through this, secure methods of sharing data will be enhanced.