Cybersecurity in Healthcare
Adoption of healthcare technology is complex, and it takes time to design and implement. Because healthcare organizations have not kept up with new trends and dangers, they are susceptible. Many healthcare systems have been forced to embrace digitization across all department levels. Adopting new technologies and new ways of working to satisfy demand has led to hospitals overlooking cyber security, thereby becoming vulnerable to cyber threats.
Healthcare cyber security is becoming increasingly significant. Hacking and IT security attacks have progressively increased over the years, and many healthcare organizations have battled to defend their network perimeter and keep cybercriminals at bay. Here are the ways to improve cyber security in healthcare systems:
Staff Training
Security awareness training should be given to everyone involved in the healthcare system, including doctors, staff, volunteers, and vendors. Using real-life hacking and phishing instances is the best technique. Some companies intentionally phish their team as a form of training. Employees need to be taught the procedure for reporting suspicious behavior for quick response.
Software Updates
Software developers offer updates for their programs and apps frequently for better performance and as a security measure. Such updates are essential because they safe computers from opportunistic cyber threats. Most of the successful system hacks result from exploiting known security flaws of an outdated program or app. Many hackers will look through freshly published lists of system vulnerabilities and then look for opportunities to exploit to access servers.
Use of Firewall
The usage of firewalls can considerably lessen the impact of cyber-attacks on healthcare. A firewall can be installed at various places throughout your network to safeguard assets on both sides by screening traffic and deleting data packets that contain risks. Remote employees can utilize firewalls to set up secure, encrypted virtual private networks (VPNs).
Passwords and Strong Authentication
Strong passwords are a great way to stay safe in an online world. A strong password is made up of long strings of letters, numbers, and characters and does not have any terms that can be found in a dictionary. Never use a set of numbers and letters that can be predicted, and do not repeat the same password for another account. In a multi-authentication system, a password should be the only step to ease a password shared or stolen by the incorrect person. Using a secondary form of identification, such as biometric data or a physical device that creates a temporary passcode, will improve your security.
Driving Digital Transformation with Data science as a Service
In a fast-paced technological world, technological interoperability has become inevitable as an organization aims to leverage every technological development for business gain. In every tenant of business, digitization helps accelerate business processes, leverage new opportunities, and solidify the organization’s position in a competitive business environment. However, digitization alone cannot provide adequate information from millions of data streams generated by modern-day industrial operations. Companies aim to unlock the power of their digitally generated data by exploiting power in analytical science, hence putting data science as a prime mover in the digital transformation process.
The increasing deluge of data leads to the need of digitizing critical business processes, which gives data science a role in harnessing data to generate insights and add value to the organization. Data science-oriented constituents such as Big Data and Analytics increase business intelligence and improve decisions made by the organization, identify new opportunities and targets, enable informed decision making, among other (see Image 1).However, having the correct data at the right time will be essential in facilitating smart planning especially through enabling the interoperability between data science and digital process to drive digital transformation by process optimizations. As consumer emotions increasingly become necessary, data science plays a critical role in knowing how consumers feel or connect - an essential factor in gaining consumer trust. More also, machine learning has proved to be a game-changer in the digital transformation process. What is interesting is that machine learning exceptionally relies on data science. Hence data science has become a backbone to the digital transformation of the modern world.
However, harnessing the full potential of innovative technologies and data requires developing an effective data science strategy. Data science as a service presents enormous opportunities by enabling businesses to efficiently leverage data science to make better decisions, operate more efficiently and profitably, offer more personalized experiences, and improve the overall quality of services. Now businesses do not have to depend on guesswork anymore since data science can help make more concrete predictions when human intuition and experience fail. The key to seizing these opportunities lies in our ability to seamlessly introduce data science into the digital transformation processes within a company.