Patients trust healthcare apps and share their sensitive information, such as personal information, and payment details. But, what if this data is misused by the the wrong hands?
Identity theft, incorrect medical treatment practices, impermissible disclosure of health records, blackmailing, and loss of trust of patients in the healthcare organization, all these things can happen following a healthcare data breach.
Hence, to avoid this, leading healthcare organizations implement various data protection and safety practices while developing healthcare apps to ensure patient data is secured from unauthorized hacks and malpractices.
In this blog, we will talk about the importance of data privacy and security in healthcare apps in detail and provide you guidance on how you can also protect patients’ health data. So, let’s start.
Importance of Data Privacy and Security in Healthcare Apps
For healthcare entities, it is crucial to maintain patients’ health data privacy and security in healthcare mobile apps for the following reasons:
1. Protection of Sensitive Data
When using telemedicine apps, patients share their sensitive information, such as personal data, medical records, and payment details.
Thus, it becomes important to protect this sensitive data from unauthorized access, otherwise, it might result in identity theft, ransomware, and other malicious activities.
2. Compliance with Regulations
It is compulsory that every healthcare mobile application must adhere to strict legal requirements and regulations, mainly HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the USA, and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe.
Similarly, different countries have different regulations that must be followed, and failing to comply with these regulations can lead to heavy fines, legal issues, investigations, and even license revocation.
3. Preventing Cybersecurity Threats
Cybercriminals target healthcare apps to steal patient data as these are easier to hack than EHRs (electronic health records).
Therefore, it becomes important to maintain data privacy and security measures in healthcare apps, to protect and mitigate ransomware, hack risks, and other similar threats.
4. Ensuring Data Integrity
Another reason why data security and privacy are important for healthcare apps is that users share data that is accurate and reliable.
Hence, if the app is not protected, any unauthorized person can tamper with the data which can lead to misdiagnosis and treatments, putting patients’ lives at risk.
5. Maintaining Patient Trust and Enhancing User Experience
Last but not least, maintaining the patient trust and enhancing user experiences are the reasons why data privacy and security are required for mhealth apps.
Patients share their sensitive information while using the app because they believe that their data will be protected and handled with the utmost level of security and care.
If telemedicine mobile app developers do not leverage high-end security measures, and an incident of data breach happens, users will lose trust, resulting in reputational damage to healthcare providers.
Moreover, users prefer to use healthcare mobile apps that vouch for high-level privacy and strong security measures.
Why Healthcare Data Breach Happens?
The following are the major reasons why healthcare data breaches happen from healthcare apps and medical EHR systems.
1. Insufficient Security Measures
The major reason for the health data breach is that many healthcare organizations do not have proper security infrastructure that can include
encryptions, advanced firewalls, authentications, and more.
Due to insufficient security measures, it becomes easy for hackers to get into the databases and steal sensitive information.
2. Outdated Technology and Systems
Still, in this digital era, where technology is emerging exponentially, several healthcare organizations use traditional methods, technologies, and systems.
These healthcare apps and systems are not created to withstand modern-age hacking. Hence, these apps and systems can easily get exploited by hackers and result in healthcare data breaches.
3. Phishing Attacks
Phishing attacks are also a major reason for healthcare data leaks. Patients, as well as healthcare employees, doctors, and nurses, are often targeted with phishing emails that trick them into getting their login credentials or clicking on malicious links.
Once they provide the details or click on the links, the phishers get access to their healthcare information; they can steal or encrypt patient data.
4. Ransomware Attacks
Another way breach takes place in the healthcare industry is through ransomware attacks. In this, cybercriminals frequently use ransomware to lock down healthcare systems, and in return demand monetary (mostly), or other benefits to unlock the systems.
Healthcare entities are often targeted by ransomware attacks they usually agree to pay cyber attackers, to protect sensitive health information and their reputation in the market.
5. Human Errors
Sometimes, human errors, such as sharing sensitive information with unauthorized persons intentionally or unintentionally, falling for social engineering attacks, losing devices that contain unencrypted data, and more, can contribute to health data breaches.
6. Third-Party Vendor Breaches
Many healthcare organizations often rely on third-party vendors to carry out processes, such as billing or getting cloud services to manage patient data.
If these vendors do not implement proper and cutting-edge security measures to protect data, hackers can easily access their systems which leads to healthcare data breaches.
7. Internal Threats
Sometimes, internal threats can be the major reason for the data breach in the healthcare sector.
Current employees, or ex-employees who have access to data gained when they were working, contractors, and others, intentionally steal data for personal gain or share the sensitive information with third parties.
The motivation behind doing this could be monetary benefits, revenge, or any other reasons.
8. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) Policies
Many healthcare entities allow employees to use personal devices in the workplace and often use these personal devices to store and access sensitive information.
As these devices are not usually equipped with high-end data privacy and security measures, such as encryption or antivirus software, they become the potential gateway to health data breaches.
9. Cloud Storage Vulnerabilities
Due to various benefits like scalability and remote access, healthcare companies are ditching local servers and shifting to cloud storage. However, they do not know that cloud storage can be a potential reason for the data breach.
If the cloud storage is misconfigured or lacks strong encryption, it becomes an easy target for hackers and patient records will be at the risk of being exposed.
10. Unsecured IoT Devices
The use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in healthcare, such as smart medical equipment and wearables, has introduced benefits but also new security challenges.
To ensure data security, healthcare providers must leverage IoT devices having adequate security measures, or else, patient data and other sensitive health information could be at stake.
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Types of Healthcare Data at Risk
It is crucial to know what types of healthcare information are vulnerable to cyber-attacks and data breaches. The types of data at risk are as follows:
1. Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
2. Protected Health Information (PHI)
3. Financial Information
4. Genetic Information
5. Electronic Health Records (EHR)
6. Prescription Information
7. Medical Device Data
8. Research and Clinical Trial Data
9. Employee and Vendor Data
10. Ongoing medical conditions
11. Emergency ward visits
12. Test and laboratory results
13. Patient demographics, and more.
Now that you have learned the types of information that are at risk of breach, let’s discuss the ways to ensure data privacy and security in healthcare apps and ensure data safety.
Proven Ways to Ensure Data Privacy and Security in Healthcare Applications
The following are the proven tactics to ensure data security and privacy in mHealth apps and keep data protected from cyber-attacks and unauthorized access.
1. Healthcare App Regulatory Compliance
While developing the telehealth mobile apps, ensure that the app complies with data privacy laws and industry standards, drafted keeping health data protection in mind.
In the USA, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) are strictly followed by healthcare app developers to enhance data security and avoid any kind of legal consequences.
2. Implement End-to-End Encryption
Another proven tactic to ensure data privacy and security in mHealth apps is encrypting data in transit.
You need to implement robust end-to-end encryption tactics to ensure that even though hackers by anyhow intercept the app’s data, they are not able to access it without proper decryption keys. This way, you can safeguard your patients’ sensitive information.
3. Using Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Multi-factor authentications will add extra layers of security to your telemedicine mobile app, protecting it from unauthorized access.
These days, healthcare app developers use various forms of authentication for healthcare apps.
These authentication forms include passwords, biometrics, face recognition, and blockchain-powered identity verification to reduce the risk of unauthorized access and data breaches.
4. Regular Security Audits and Penetration Testing
In order to keep your healthcare and medical EHR systems protected, you need to conduct frequent audits and vulnerability assessments to identify weaknesses that can be exploited by hackers to access your app and sensitive information.
By doing so, you can identify weak points, fix them, and rest assured that the patient information and healthcare app, both are secured from cyberattacks.
5. Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
This security feature is designed for implementation in healthcare organizations, such as hospitals, medical facilities, laboratories, insurance offices, and others.
The Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) limits access to sensitive data based on a user’s specific role within the organization. Meaning, the permissions to access data in the organization will be assigned to employees according to job responsibilities.
This way, only authorized personnel can access, modify, or share particular information. This approach minimizes the risk of data breaches as no unauthorized person can access or share confidential patient data.
6. Secure Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
By using secure application programming interfaces (APIs), you can protect the exchange of data between healthcare apps and external systems.
APIs implement strong authentication, data validation protocols, and encryptions to prevent authorized access and data breaches.
Therefore, by using secure APIs while healthcare app development, you can protect sensitive health data from cyber threats.
7. Regular Software Updates and Patches
Regular software updates and patches are necessary to safeguard sensitive health information and patient data.
The traditional versions of the software are not secure enough to tackle modern cyber attacks. This is why healthcare organizations using traditional healthcare systems are usually vulnerable to cyber attacks.
So, it is recommended to regularly update software to fix visible vulnerabilities, enhance the app’s functionalities, and ensure that it is compliant with the latest security standards.
8. Data Anonymization and Tokenization
Data anonymization and tokenization are some of the best ways to assure patient data privacy.
Anonymization eliminates identifiable information, making it impossible to track data back to individuals. In simple terms, even if hackers access the data, they cannot identify the patient.
In contrast, tokenization substitutes sensitive data with randomly generated tokens.
replaces sensitive data with randomly generated tokens. If unauthorized personnel access these, they cannot interpret it. Both these methods are used in the healthcare industry to reduce the risk of privacy breaches.
9. Secure Cloud Storage
As discussed earlier, if the cloud does not have proper security measures, it will be easy for hackers to access the information stored.
Thus, if you are using the cloud to store patient data, you must make it highly secure by implementing encryptions, access controls, and regular backups.
This approach will ensure that the information stored on the cloud is protected from breaches
10. Use Blockchain for Data Integrity
The role of blockchain in the healthcare industry has always been a crucial one. Blockchain is used to create an immutable and decentralized ledger on which patient records and transactions are recorded.
Each data entry in the blockchain is securely encrypted and time-stamped, and it is almost impossible to tamper with this data.
Moreover, because of the transparency offered by blockchain, if any unauthorized changes are made, they will be detected by the other participants, hence, the risk of a data breach is eliminated.
11. Data Minimization
Data minimization is the process of collecting relevant data and deleting the rest. You can use this principle for your healthcare mobile apps; collecting data that is required truly for the app to function.
Through data minimization, you will have only the required data and the impact of a data breach would be minimal. Also, you need to review the stored data frequently and delete the no-longer required information.
12. User Consent and Transparency
Always take consent from users before collecting their data for your healthcare apps. Your users must be informed about how their information is collected and shared with other organizations and for what purposes.
By maintaining transparency and clear communication, you can gain the trust of your users, and ensure that users have control over their sensitive information.
13. Implement AI-Powered Threat Detection
AI-powered intelligent models can be used to detect unusual behavior and security threats. These models use machine learning algorithms and detect potential breaches or vulnerabilities happening in the app, in real-time.
Healthcare organizations these days are significantly relying on artificial intelligence to prevent cyberattacks on their databases and ensure a high level of security and privacy for their healthcare apps.
14. Training and Awareness
You need to make your employees and users aware to prevent potential data breaches.
You can organize webinars, and publish educational resources, text messages, and emails, to educate users and your staff about cybersecurity best practices.
In these webinars and resources, you can provide information about common tactics used by hackers to steal information, recognizing phishing attempts and proper data handling, and minimizing human errors, which are a common cause of breaches.
15. Incident Response Plan
Despite following all the preventive measures, if the breach happens, you must be ready with an incident response plan to minimize the impact of the breach.
Think of worst-case scenarios, and prepare well-structured plans to minimize the consequences of the data breach.
So, by following these protective measures, you can ensure data privacy and security for your telemedicine mobile application.
Must Read: How to Monetize Health and Fitness Data.
Process to Implement Data Privacy and Security in Healthcare Apps
To implement data privacy and security measures while developing the healthcare app, follow these steps:
1. Understand Regulatory Requirements
First of all, you need to understand the required regulatory protocols for your healthcare app. In the USA, you need to follow HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations.
In case your targeted user base involves Europe, then you also need to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations. Similarly, learn about regulations for particular areas in the world.
2. Conduct a Risk Assessment
Conduct a thorough risk assessment to identify loopholes in the app’s architecture, data storage, and transmission methods, that can be used by cyber-attackers to access data.
3. Implement Strong Authentication Mechanisms
Add at least two forms of identification to access the healthcare app. You can use a password and a one-time passcode (OTP) for this.
Also, to enhance security, you can add an additional layer of authentication, such as blockchain-powered identity verification, in case unusual user patterns are detected by the AI models in the app.
4. Encrypt Data
Encrypt the data stored on the servers to prevent unauthorized access. You can use protocols like Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt data transmitted between your healthcare app and the server.
5. Continuous Monitoring and Auditing
Keep a tight eye to check whether the security measures are working properly. You must conduct security audits and assessments frequently to evaluate their effectiveness.
If there is any scope for improvement, do it immediately, and ensure that the patient information stays secured.
Conclusion
As a healthcare services provider, you need to safeguard your patient data and other related information because if cyberattackers get access to them, they will exploit them for their personal gain or share them with other parties.
As a result, your patients will lose trust in your organization and you will face monetary as well as reputational damages. Moreover, chances are that you could also face legal repercussions.
With this blog, we explained the importance of data privacy and security in healthcare apps, as apps are more vulnerable to cyber threats. We also mentioned the proven ways you can use to enhance your healthcare app’s data privacy and security.
If you need more information on data protection or want to implement robust security measures to safeguard the app from cyber attacks, feel free to contact us. For more information, visit www.quytech.com