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High User Adoption of Secure Communication Crucial to Combat Healthcare Cyberattacks

Hospitals today are faced with mounting risks and challenges. From value-based care to an increasingly complex threat landscape, hospitals are faced with conflicting pressures. On the one hand, hospitals want to adopt new technologies to modernize the healthcare experience and improve patient outcomes. While new technologies are layered into the hospital setting, legacy technologies remain in use. In communication, these systems (DTEC phones, pagers) could be 10 or 20 years old, creating central issues around workflow and patient-cantered care delivery that conflict with the goals of these modernizing efforts. 

As all these new systems and internet-enabled “things” (IoT) are added to the hospital, an increasingly complex security landscape emerges. CIOs and IT administrators struggle to manage and secure a growing number of devices and systems accessing hospital data and the increasingly complex workflows experienced by the care team are leading rise to additional data security risks. 

Physicians & Nurses Bypass Secure Communication to Remain Productive

Let’s look at a common communication challenge for most hospitals. Most hospitals still rely heavily on pager systems, with some physicians carrying up to 6 separate pager devices. Messages are often unreturned or pages are sent to the wrong on-call physician leading to wasted time and errors. Nurses end up running to and from the nurse workstation to look up numbers or await callbacks. At a macro level, these kinds of communication inefficiencies have led to a $12 billion annual loss for hospitals, but at the hospital level, these inefficiencies encourage non-secure messaging practices. 

If you were a doctor looking for a consult or a nurse looking to close the loop on a critical lab result, would you want to spend 20 minutes playing pager and phone tag? Or would you hop onto your phone and send a quick SMS text message, getting that reply back in seconds? 

The inefficiencies experienced in today’s hospitals have led to a dramatic rise in non-HIPAA compliant messaging that many hospitals struggle to rein in. While non-compliant messaging alone is a major compliance issue, the practice has left hospitals open to attack from phishing campaigns that spread malware and ransomware. The success of recent campaigns such as WannaCry and Petya show that many people will click on links in emails or text messages with honest expectations of the message being work related. 

Driving Up User Adoption Improves Security Posture

There are many security solutions on the market that aim to combat persistent attacks, phishing and malware. We’re not one of those. But what we do offer is a secure text messaging platform that users want to use - and we make it easy to use, with a simple tap that logs you into shared devices / BYOD devices and applications. And that could be key to combatting the rise of non-compliant behaviour and reducing the effectiveness of phishing attacks. 

Many secure text messaging solutions today fail to recognize existing workflows, processes or user groups. With low adoption, they don’t offer a value-add to entice users away from non-compliant messaging. Several Telmediq clients came to us after unsuccessfully deploying a different standalone secure messaging solution, while convenient, the adoption rate remained low. These companies realized that their secure messaging solution needed to integrate with other systems (on-call scheduling, EHR, pager networks, nurse call, labs) in order to provide value to users and to work within existing workflows. Telmediq was able to work with these clients to solve critical communication gaps around interoperability, availability and user experience that helped drive up adoption - and keep it there.

So, how does high adoption of a secure health communications platform make a difference with security? A high adoption of the platform helps keep those attacks from succeeding on physician devices. In your phishing training, you can simply say: if it doesn’t come through Telmediq, don’t click it. When you know where your patient communications always come from, you’re much more likely to be suspicious of the anomalous text message or email. 

We know the importance of security at Telmediq. The Telmediq Healthcare Communications Hub effectively containerizes ePHI, protecting it during storage and transmission, protecting it against application infiltration and against accidental exposure. You can rely on:

  • 2 Factor & Biometric Authentication
  • End-to-end data encryption
  • Message lifespan controls 
  • Remote control lock & wipe 
  • Intrusion detection and alarming
  • A closed system that cannot be penetrated by malware on an infected device
  • Audit logging

Learn more about how to simplify - and secure - your healthcare communications with Telmediq.

Speak with a Communications Specialist Button 

 

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