Outside of financial information and personal data, it’s hard to imagine any sensitive info more important to protect than medical data. Most people would prefer it if their address leaked rather than their full medical record was accessed by unscrupulous actors because the latter is absolutely more sensitive than almost anything else. It’s highly personal, and should only ever be in the hands of medical practitioners who are fully licensed, vetted and approved, and even then only in relevant use cases.
As such, it’s important to make certain that any medical startup understands the weight of responsibility they have on their shoulders. Cybersecurity practice is simply non-negotiable and must be considered no matter how you plan to revolutionize the industry. Without this, nothing else can proceed.
We explore cybersecurity threats. How SOC services can provide peace of mind in these situations.
Remember that the healthcare sector is a prime target for cybercriminals. For a medical startup, a single security slip could mean losing patient trust, facing massive fines, and potentially shutting down the business with criminal charges a further possibility. Not good at all.
In this post, we intend to help you build the foundation that helps you avoid that outcome. Please consider the following:
Implementing essential access controls
Not everyone in your startup needs access to everything, but it’s not just about documents you have on file either. As with medical device cybersecurity, how these products access, control and submit data must be managed with highly professional and trustworthy protective services. As per your wider management, creating clear roles with restricted access levels is essential to ensure no data is exposed where it shouldn’t be.
As standard, that means using multi-factor authentication everywhere, especially on professional accounts within your managed IT software systems. In practice, this could be a password plus a code sent to a phone, or a physical security key. These extra steps might seem annoying, but they can ensure that protections against account penetration are secured.
Regular security training
Your team is both your greatest asset and your biggest potential vulnerability, and hackers or data thieves know this. They’re counting on it. One clicked phishing email can compromise everything if you’re not careful, and so teams must understand what threats and common strategies are likely to be used against them before they are.
Of course, you need to cover basics like recognising suspicious emails, understanding why using public WiFi for work is risky, and the importance of strong, unique passwords, especially as your team may include clinicians leveraging flexible staffing options for advanced practice. But you should also make it clear what your reporting pathways are for, how to notify managers if you’re at all concerned, and better yet, why the levels of encryption in your product or service are so important to work with, not shortcut through.
Encrypt everything
In fields as essential as this, encrypting even the most placid communications must be a standard. No matter if data is sitting in your systems (at rest) or moving between devices and servers (in transit), it needs protection to prevent anyone from spying on communication strategies and using those to gain deeper access. For instance, medical startups often use strong encryption standards like AES-256 for stored data and TLS for data in motion.
Functionally, this encryption turns your data into an unreadable code if someone unauthorized gets their hands on it. So even if a laptop is stolen or an email is intercepted, your patients’ information remains safe. It’s not the full protective plan, but just part of it, and an essential means. You can also make certain all employee communication is pushed through the correct filters.
Curate a backup & recovery plan
Just because medical data is so essential to protect and a breach is never acceptable should not mean you can neglect plans for what happens when something goes wrong. An issue might be experienced and however much you can limit the damage of that is worth your time investment to plan for. For instance, servers crash, ransomware attacks occur, and human errors take place, but it’s how you catch those issues or limit their impact that really counts.
Many services use the 3-2-1 backup rule: three copies of data, on two different types of media, with one copy stored offsite or in the cloud. Recovery plan services can help you standardize up-to-date methodologies and better test your recovery process on a consistent basis, with repeat audits too. That helps you know exactly how long it would take to get your systems back online if something goes wrong.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily manage the best cybersecurity practices. These are not the full suite of practices you should try, but a good foundation to build to ensure ongoing security is guaranteed.