Healthcare organizations are doing very little to keep patient data safe, says this industry expert

Data security is crucial, especially in the healthcare industry. However, organizations are not doing enough to protect this data.

“Healthcare organizations are doing very little to keep their patient data safe and even less to keep their employee data safe. There are almost daily reports of data breaches and malware in healthcare. The most recent slew of reports weren’t even illegal hacks, but cases where hospital marketing teams added code to their websites that directly shared patient information with companies like Facebook and Instagram,” explains DoorSpace CEO Sarah M. Worthy.

Hospitals even demand clinicians share data to overseas contractors, which often leads to this information being potentially accessible and at risk.

“I believe the problems with a lack of patient data protections are a larger problem than employee data, but I regularly come across situations where hospitals demand clinicians share their login and passwords to personal accounts and they give all of their personnel data over to overseas contractors – often just putting all of this information into a cloud storage system that is accessible to anyone able to find the link. Fortunately, we don’t hear a lot about physicians having their professional identities stolen – but these hospitals make it very easy for anyone with decent technical skills to find everything they’d need to impersonate a clinician for a job, credit application or even to fill prescriptions using that physician’s DEA license,” says Worthy.

Patient and employee data is something that should be a priority for healthcare organizations, but the system is more fragile than people may believe.

“The vast majority of systems in hospitals today have virtually no real protections for employee data. I think DoorSpace is truly unique in this space because data security and data access are core to our decision making process in how we build out our platform. It’s critical that everything in our system is encrypted and that clinicians have control over how this data is used and are informed of who is able to access and see their professional data,” Worthy states.

Sarah M. Worthy is the CEO and founder of DoorSpace, a company that is transforming the way healthcare organizations retain and develop talent while solving critical turnover issues in the healthcare industry. Sarah has over 15 years of experience in the B2B technology and healthcare industries. 

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