Are you overlooking your privacy compliance? If so, it's time to paid some attention as investigators are keeping a close watch.
For instance, last year, officials of a health system in Connecticut announced that an unencrypted hard drive stocked with about 1.
5 million patients' information on it was stolen, thus potentially subjecting that protected health information(PHI) to abuse.
Moreover, with the introduction of the HITECH act, there's no doubt that patient privacy is gearing up to take center stage.
And with employees taking work home and carrying laptops or cell phones with them to office, it's highly essential that your office's security is tight.
If you want to safeguard your data, you should go for encryption even though the government does not require it.
The HITECH act does not require encryption, but a provision of the act addresses breach notification in healthcare IT technology.
Even though the law does not require encryption, it can help you avoid a lot of problems.
It's said that encryption is by far the recommended means for protecting information on hard drives.
If you have encrypted your data, you have taken a great step; but if you're encrypting only certain files, you may not ensure total privacy.
Any provider who is making use of their machine with access to PHI or any other information that can be used for identity theft really should have the entire hard drive encrypted.
What's more, you should also avoid easy passwords.
You shouldn't compromise the data by using passwords that are easy to get through.
You should use strong passwords which involve a series of letters, numbers and/or symbols.