Securing Digital Communications in Healthcare: What You Need to Know

While digital communications with customers need to be effective in any industry to achieve their intended goal, for healthcare organizations, above all else, they must be secure.

It’s critical that patient data, i.e., protected health information (PHI), is secured due to its sensitive nature and the considerable harm its exposure or corruption could cause. Consequently, well aware of the sensitivity and the value of PHI, cybercriminals target healthcare organizations, making it vital that they implement the appropriate mitigation measures to protect PHI, which typically includes the deployment of HIPAA-compliant communication solutions.

With all this firmly in mind, this post looks at key measures for securing digital communications in healthcare organizations, reducing the risk of data breaches, authorized access, and the ramifications of HIPAA compliance.

Why Securing Digital Communications In Healthcare Is So Important?

Before honing in on different ways to secure the digital communications that occur within your healthcare company, let’s first explore why doing so is crucial.

The Sensitivity of PHI

The foremost reason that it’s crucial to secure the digital communications in your healthcare organization is due to the sensitive nature of patient data. As well as personal data, such as an individual’s name, social security number, address, etc., PHI includes their medical history – which a person, for a variety of wholly justifiable reasons, would not want publicly disclosed.

Additionally, in holding a patient or customer’s personal data, healthcare providers, payers, and suppliers have an ethical obligation to secure it, respecting an individual’s right to privacy.

Healthcare Companies Are Prime Targets for Cybercriminals

The sensitivity of PHI and the potential consequences of its exposure or corruption make healthcare companies common targets for malicious actors.

A recent notable example of a cyberattack against a healthcare organization is a business email compromise (BEC) attack that targeted Community Health Systems in October 2024. Cybercriminals masqueraded as trusted vendors, convincing finance and IT staff to transfer funds, affecting 4 million patients and highlighting the need for email authentication protocols, such as DMARC, SPF, and DKIM.

Innovation Results in More Digital Patient Data

As more digital healthcare solutions emerge, such as wearables, smart devices, and AI systems, the greater the amount of digital data that must be secured. While such innovation enables healthcare organizations to become more efficient and facilitate better health outcomes for their patients, they provide another “attack vector” for cybercriminals and must be secured.

HIPAA-compliance

For the reasons detailed above, healthcare organizations that handle PHI are subject to HIPAA regulations that are designed to ensure the security of sensitive patient data. This means that healthcare organizations have a regulatory obligation to secure their digital communications. The consequences of HIPAA non-compliance include financial penalties, legal repercussions, operational disruption, and reputational damage.

Worse, the damage to your reputation can extend past existing and prospective customers to your relationships with partners and other third parties you rely on for your operations – as you’ve demonstrated you pose a supply chain risk to them.

Strategies for Securing Digital Communications In Healthcare

With greater insight into why digital communications in healthcare must be secured, let’s move on to looking at different ways to achieve this and key steps you can take:

Undertake Regular Risk Assessments and Security Audits

Perform regular risk assessments and cybersecurity audits to identify and address potential threats to PHI. This includes cataloguing sensitive data, the security posture of systems and applications in which PHI resides, and reviewing access controls (including third-party access). These should be conducted frequently, i.e., at least annually, or when your company makes changes to its IT infrastructure or operations that could affect the security of digital communications.

Deploy Continuous Monitoring Solutions

In addition to your periodic risk assessments, you need to continually monitor your IT infrastructure for suspicious activity and potential data breaches. However, continuous monitoring is only effective if you also have a comprehensive incident response plan, so your personnel has a prescribed course of action if they detect a potential threat to PHI.

Encrypt Sensitive Data

Encrypting PHI at rest (where it’s stored) and in transit (when included in email and other communications) is a key measure against the exposure of patient data – even in the event it’s exfiltrated during a breach. Consequently, encrypting patient data both at rest and transit are requirements for HIPAA compliance and must be a key component of your strategy to secure digital communications.

Develop a Patch Management Strategy

Patch management, i.e., frequently updating your applications and systems, is vital for addressing potential vulnerabilities within your IT infrastructure and securing the data within. Vendors often release updates and patches in response to security flaws they’ve discovered in their software. Subsequently, malicious actors also become aware of these vulnerabilities and target users who haven’t downloaded the latest update.

Restrict Access to PHI

Access control is a fundamental tenet of secure digital communications, ensuring only authorized employees can access patient data, as per their job role (i.e., role-based access control). As alluded to above, periodically reviewing access permissions and updating them accordingly should form part of your security audits.

 Strengthen Your Password Policies

Employees who are tasked with handling PHI have a responsibility to prevent unauthorized access by securing their access credentials, i.e., their username and password. Ensuring strong password hygiene is central to this and healthcare organizations can facilitate this by strengthening their password policies.  While it’s long been common practice to select a password with a variety of characters (uppercase, numbers, etc.), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) now recommends prioritizing password length, e.g., 15 characters or more, over intricate character combinations.

Implement Multi-Factor Authorization (MFA) 

MFA is another effective measure against unauthorized access to PHI, with a user being required to prove their identity in more than one way. Instead of merely entering a username and password to log in, a user must provide at least two of the following means of authentication, which includes:

• Something they know: Username and password, PIN, answers to personal security questions.
• Something they have: one-time password (OTP) via app or SMS, security fob (i.e., an RSA token), smart card, access badge.
• Something they are: biometric markers, i.e., fingerprints, retina scans, voice or facial recognition.

Invest in Employees Cybersecurity Awareness Training 

As well as implementing the security policies and controls outlined above, organizations should provide ongoing cybersecurity training for all employees – with additional, specialized training for those who handle PHI the most. Comprehensive cybersecurity awareness training should include:

• • Key cyber threats and how they typically present themselves, e.g., how to recognize phishing attempts.
  • Different forms of malware, e.g., ransomware, viruses, spyware, etc., and how it’s downloaded onto devices.
  • The procedure for reporting unusual activity., i.e., who to contact, where to find incident report forms and how to complete them.
  • Refraining from installing applications without IT’s permission or awareness, i.e., “shadow” IT which causes users to unknowingly introduce vulnerabilities to their IT ecosystem.
  • Other cybersecurity best practices as per the needs of your company.

Keep Up-To-Date With Emerging Cyber Threats

In addition to educating your employees on cybersecurity,  a key aspect of securing digital communications is your organization as a whole staying informed about the latest cyber threats and trends. To this end, it’s important to develop a strategy for attaining the latest threat intelligence and using that knowledge to strengthen your security posture.

Mitigate Third-Party Risk 

As alluded to earlier, a consequence of suffering a data breach is the reputational damage suffered if suppliers, partners, and other trusted third parties integral to your company feel they can’t trust you with sensitive data. However, this runs both ways, and they also have to demonstrate their ability to securely handle your PHI by having the appropriate security standards and protocols in place.

A key way of mitigating third-party is ensuring you have business associate agreements (BAAs) in place, which outlines your respective responsibilities in securing patient data, as required for HIPAA compliance.

Use Secure Digital Communication Solutions

Deploy HIPAA-compliant communication solutions, such as LuxSci, to best secure the digital communications within your company. Designed with the security needs and regulatory obligations of healthcare organizations in mind, HIPAA-compliant communication platforms provide the infrastructure and functionality to ensure communications with patients and customers remain secure and the privacy of their personal information.

How LuxSci Helps Secure Digital Communications in Healthcare

With more than 20 years of experience in delivering best-in-class secure healthcare communication solutions, LuxSci is a trusted partner for healthcare organizations looking to secure their digital communications in line with regulatory standards and the industry’s highest security standards. LuxSci’s suite of HIPAA-compliant solutions includes:

• Secure Email: HIPAA-compliant email solutions for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 and high-volume solutions for executing highly scalable email campaigns that include PHI – millions of emails per month.
• Secure Marketing: Proactively connect with patients and customers with HIPAA-compliant email marketing for increased engagement, lead generation and sales.
• Secure Forms: Securely and efficiently collect and store PHI without compromising security or compliance – for on-boarding new patients and customers and gathering intelligence for personalization.
• Secure Text Messaging: Engage with patients and customers over SMS, with secure access to sensitive data.

Interested in discovering more about LuxSci’s capabilities for securing your company’s digital communications? Contact us today!