Apr 25
2014
Tips for Risk Assessment in Healthcare IT Security
Guest post by Lysa Myers, security researcher, ESET.
Risk assessment is something we all do, every day, in healthcare and in our daily lives. Consider crossing the road. Should you cross at the lights? Can you trust the traffic to obey the lights? Doctors perform risk assessments when prescribing medications or evaluating a patient for an operation. Unfortunately, risk assessment for electronic health records (EHRs) is not fully understood or implemented by some healthcare organizations, especially smaller facilities that lack dedicated IT or security staff. Yet, this type of risk assessment is increasingly important to the success of healthcare-related businesses.
How do you proceed if your organization lacks the expertise to complete an EHR risk assessment? Because this is such a complex topic, the answer to that question could easily fill volumes. But we all have to start somewhere, so I will provide a basic description to steer you in the right direction to do more in-depth research on your own.
How to do an EHR risk assessment
There are four basic steps – the time and effort they require depends upon the size and complexity of your organization, and the thoroughness of your assessment. You may wish to do your assessment in multiple passes over time, getting more in-depth as you go. This turns a huge headache that must be dealt with all at once into something more manageable that can be revisited to keep up with changes as they occur.