Healthcare organizations continue to face relentless cyberattacks owing to the immense value placed on patient health information on the dark web. Patient records have almost everything the attacker needs to carry out sophisticated insurance fraud schemes, purchase medical supplies or drugs, or commit other types of fraud including outright identity theft.
In addition to the theft of
personal health information (PHI), healthcare organizations are increasingly faced with ransomware attacks that cripple operations and make it nearly impossible to deliver patient care. Because of the grave risks to patient care and safety in the event of a cyberattack, healthcare organizations are required to be
HIPAA compliant.
Continuous compliance with HIPAA has been shown to help healthcare organizations secure their environment from cyberattacks; meeting the requirements of HIPAA requires most businesses to set up strong processes, methods and controls to assure auditors that security and integrity of PHI are assured.
However, because of the technical skills gap – the difficulty in hiring, training and retaining skilled cybersecurity talent – healthcare organizations are often faced with the difficult choice of merely passing a HIPAA audit by adopting check-box practices or expending resources to implement continuous compliance practices.
On the one hand, check-box compliance practices help healthcare organizations meet the short-term goal of passing a HIPAA audit. However, though these practices help healthcare organizations pass the audit, they are often not sufficient to truly secure their environment.
To do this, healthcare organizations must implement continuous compliance practices, such as
file integrity monitoring (FIM) and
secure configuration management (SCM). Robust file integrity monitoring and secure configuration management can help healthcare organizations truly secure their environment whilst achieving continuous HIPAA compliance.
However, due to the technical skills gap, healthcare organizations often don’t have the necessary resources to devote to continuous compliance.
Healthcare organizations need not choose between passing an audit and having continuous compliance. By leveraging the benefits of a managed security provider, healthcare organizations can have the best of both worlds. They can achieve and prove compliance with HIPAA audit and truly secure their environment with continuous compliance.
Managed security providers help healthcare organizations by acting as an extension of their team, providing end-to-end visibility and ensuring that their environments are not only compliant with HIPAA but that their critical assets including
EHR systems are secure. And all of these benefits are available to healthcare organizations without the concern about hiring training and retaining skilled staff.
Tripwire
ExpertOps combines managed services with the industry’s best FIM and SIM solutions to help healthcare organizations address the requirements of the HIPAA security rule, as outlined in Section 164. ExpertOps also provides personalized consulting, HIPAA audit support and cloud-based infrastructure to help you achieve and maintain compliance. The solution is easy to deploy and use, with simple subscription pricing and a low total cost of ownership.
Tripwire ExpertOps enables you to rapidly achieve compliance with HIPAA by reducing the attack surface, increasing system integrity and delivering continuous compliance, including ensuring the security of your EHR system. Plus, because Tripwire ExpertOps includes personalized consulting, you receive ongoing support from a designated Tripwire Expert.
ExpertOps can help healthcare organizations surmount the challenges of achieving HIPAA compliance and have great security with small teams. To learn more about how Tripwire ExpertOps can help you achieve HIPAA compliance,
click here.
