Preventing cyberthreats webinar

Practical ways to prevent a cybersecurity attack on your enterprise cloud imaging data

Join Mike Swyt, chief information security officer and Sonia Gupta, MD, chief medical officer at Optum, as they discuss practical steps that health care executives can take to safeguard their enterprise imaging data and prevent cyberthreats from impacting patient care.

The health care industry is highly prone to cybersecurity attacks. In the past year, serious security incidents increased by 70%. These incidents are deemed “serious” for several reasons, including data breaches and high cost. When a hospital experiences a breach, the costs average around $9.2 million per incident. Read on to discover practical ways to prevent a cybersecurity attack on your enterprise cloud imaging data.

Between phishing emails, outdated systems and unprotected hardware, many vulnerabilities and entry points exist within health care systems. These vulnerabilities leave the hospital open to worst-case scenarios, such as shutting down an ER or a critical system (like radiology) and diverting patients to other facilities.

Enhance security to improve speed and scalability

Being in a cloud-native multi-tenant environment — one that offers seamless updates in the background and follows the highest security rigor with third-party certification — provides you with a highly secure imaging environment. Offering third-party certification to address cybersecurity challenges is key. By helping customers move to a cloud-native environment and having them on the latest version, we help protect valuable patient data, proactively address security issues and prevent hackers from attacking legacy systems that might be vulnerable.

Behind EHRs, imaging data is the second largest data set in health care. By reducing vulnerabilities to outdated and under protected systems, hospitals can enable a more secure environment for keeping patient data safe. With cloud innovation, security updates happen seamlessly in the background. In other words, improved efficiency is an enhanced technology output. Cloud-native architecture eliminates the need for hospital IT-managed hardware and software updates because it lets organizations elastically scale and automatically stay on the latest version. Cloud-native architecture offers speed, security and scalability — all critical functions for clinicians seeking workflow efficiency.

Cloud-native innovation’s benefits extend beyond cybersecurity and workflow efficiency to address other concerns prevalent throughout enterprise imaging. For example, clinicians’ number one concern is delivering patient care, and downtime prevents care delivery. Because multi-tenant cloud-native innovation eliminates the disruptive nature of updates that can take down a PACs system, clinicians are not stressed by the updates. Instead, updates are integrated into the system seamlessly. Clinicians don’t even know they’re happening, and care is delivered without interruption.

Preventive measures to ensure a more secure environment

For starters, organizations can shore up their technical debt by updating their imaging systems. Doing so can also help prevent a bigger issue of cleaning up and catching up on security issues. It’s also important to implement two-factor access to data to strengthen the systems’ access controls.

Besides updating systems and strengthening access controls, it’s critical to create a robust training culture that continually teaches employees how to spot sophisticated phishing emails and other social engineering attacks. One email is all it takes to penetrate and shut down a hospital system and cost an organization millions of dollars. 

Also, organizations can look at each solution’s cloud infrastructure provider and how that entity is securing the cloud environment and ask about the standards they are applying. Those using third-party certification and standards alignment — which indicates what security protocols are in place — are using the highest standards and are engaged in the best security practices.

As the developer of the first major cloud-native enterprise imaging platform, Optum has the infrastructure, network and expertise to help you stay secure, speedy and ready to scale.