Cybersecurity continues to be a pain point in healthcare

Cybersecurity is a critical pain point for healthcare organizations of all sizes and specialties. The industry faces a unique threat landscape as a successful breach could threaten life-critical services, the delivery of life-saving drugs, and prevent healthcare professionals from delivering patient care.

As increasingly sophisticated attack vectors emerge, like phishing, ransomware, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, your healthcare IT risk goes beyond financial loss and loss of privacy. Increasingly, managed IT services are crucial to ensuring security posture, controls, and defenses are in place to protect your patients, staff, and data. And regardless of the size of your healthcare practice, it’s imperative to understand that your organization is a target for cybercriminals.

The size of healthcare’s cybersecurity risk

The threat to healthcare organizations is growing as hackers increasingly target their valuable personal healthcare information (PHI). Healthcare has faced the costliest breaches of any industry for over a decade. The average breach cost organizations a record high of $10.1 million in 2022, an increase of nearly $1 million on 2021, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report.

These sky-high returns have led to a surge in cybercriminals targeting the industry. Infoblox research found the U.S. healthcare sector suffered 521 major data breaches in 2021, a 25% increase on 2020, which impacted more than 43 million patient records. 

That threat is only increasing as new breaches target specialty healthcare firms, and new attack vectors are discovered daily.

Taking the fight back to cybercriminals

As new sophisticated threats emerge, you need to strengthen your security posture and defenses to protect patients and staff, secure your data, maintain a high quality of care, and deliver streamlined operations. Tactics and best practices you need to provide this include:

Improved visibility

You can only stop the security threats you can see, so it’s vital to ensure you have monitoring technology to discover and prevent vulnerabilities across your entire network.

Removing third-party risks

Vulnerabilities in third-party software are the third-most common and costly form of data breach, accounting for 13% of attacks and costing $4.55 million per breach, according to IBM research. So it’s vital to have the right tools in place to manage third-party risks effectively and onboard new vendors securely.

Employee awareness

Your employees are your first line of defense against security attacks. They need to be aware of the risks they face, the tactics cybercriminals use to target them, and be able to spot the signs of a potential malicious attack.

Robust security controls

Technologies that discover, block, and mitigate all security incidents help you to enhance data control. A minimum security measure is enforcing the use of multi-factor authentication by all staff. This ensures only authorized employees can access the data and systems they have the right to – which helps to prevent a data breach even if an attacker obtains an employee’s password. Other security controls include anti-virus, data loss prevention, firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, mobile device management, network segmentation, threat intelligence, and vulnerability scans.

Why you need healthcare-focused managed IT services

Fighting your growing cybersecurity threats alone demands significant staffing, technology, and time investment. It requires a proactive approach to security that protects you against emerging threats, enhances your security posture, and ensures compliance with increasingly stringent industry and regulatory requirements. 

Managed IT services remove the manual effort of protecting your patients’ PHI data, networks, and systems around the clock without hiring an expensive internal security team. It provides a 24/7 understanding of your risk, including new and emerging threats, and enables you to block and mitigate threats as soon as they emerge.

Bolster your security posture with Dedicated IT

Our managed IT services provide you with all the expertise and tools required to make your business better tomorrow than you are today. We help you implement a robust cybersecurity program tailored to your specific requirements, proactively discover, block, and mitigate sophisticated threats, meet regulatory expectations, and satisfy cyber insurance requirements.

Discover how Dedicated IT helps you fight the latest cybersecurity threats facing the healthcare industry and implement all the controls you need to protect your patients, staff, and data. Contact us today to get started.

LAKE PARK, FL – July 15, 2022 – Last Friday Dedicated IT celebrated National Video Game Day (July 8^th) with their team by hosting a company-wide gaming event where employees submitted a donation to play. Organized by Robin Stark, Executive Assistant to Managing Partners, and Kelsey Poole, HR Generalist, more than 23 employees participated or donated, allowing Dedicated IT to raise $650 for the Red Apple Supplies program. 

“Creating a fun work environment is essential to our business, especially because of our ever-evolving hybrid workforce,” says Kelsey. “Our team has worked hard to find unique ways to involve our employees, celebrate fun holidays together, and kick back at work, while at the same time doing something that allows us to give back to our community as a team,” adds Robin. 

“Dedicated IT is on a mission to make people and organizations better tomorrow than they are today,” says Aaron Underhill, CEO and Managing Partner of Dedicated IT. “Our company is proud to be able to match the donations our employees submitted, and we look forward to hosting more events like this to give back to our local Palm Beach County community and beyond.” 

About the Event 

Dedicated IT employees donated a minimum of $5 to play the online game Krunker.io. Once donations were submitted, they were able to select a time slot to play. On the day of the event, their team joined each other live via Microsoft Teams to participate in or watch the matches and ended the fun with a celebratory virtual happy hour afterwards.  

About Dedicated IT 

Dedicated IT provides organizations with an IT service experience like no other. Everything we do is with the goal of making you better tomorrow than you are today. We want to see your business operate without IT disruptions and restrictions and innovate more than ever. Our tailored support and service model was built from the ground up with you in mind. We deeply invest in learning how your business uses technology, its security posture, and issues that will quickly turn into IT time bombs, then present a technology roadmap to help you avoid all headaches. Support from Dedicated IT only gets better with time, as we gather more data points from your technology that can be used for optimization. 

About Red Apple Supplies – Education Foundation of Palm Beach County 

Red Apple Supplies, one of Education Foundation of Palm Beach County’s signature programs, is a free teacher resource store to equip teachers with essential school supplies for their classrooms.  Since opening in 2016, Red Apple Supplies has distributed over $1 million in school supplies to Title I schools. During the 2021-22 school year, Red Apple Supplies distributed over $1.4 million in free school supplies to over 52,131 students in Palm Beach Country; served 76 Title I Schools with 83% or higher Free and Reduced Lunch Rate; and expanded inventory through STEM, Health, Financial Literacy and Digital Inclusion sections.  

The mission of Red Apple Supplies is to serve the educational and creative needs of children in Palm Beach County public schools by providing a means to transfer donated school supplies from businesses, organizations, and individuals free to teachers for use in classrooms throughout the school year. 

Upcoming Events with Education Foundation of Palm Beach County 

Dedicated IT is a proud sponsor of the Education Foundation of Palm Beach Country’s upcoming Heroes for Education Run Walk, happening on Saturday, October 29 at John Prince Park in Lake Worth, FL. To learn more about this event, please visit here. 

Leverage a Managed Service Provider to Improve Your IT Function

If you’re in charge of making IT-related decisions or overseeing IT staff, there’s a lot on your plate.  You’re responsible for everything from procurement to support tickets to budget planning to vendor management. How can a managed service provider ease the burden of IT?

No time to focus on IT? We know.

Effective IT can run efficiently and effortlessly. By partnering with a reliable IT provider, you won’t have to waste time think about routine IT issues or improvements. Instead, you can focus on the big things.

Too busy to oversee vendors? We manage that.

An experienced IT provider understands your technology, your vendors, and the concept shared responsibility. By offloading vendor management to a manage service provider, you can hold vendors accountable to your security standards.

Inundated with staff questions? We’ve got you.

Questions and IT issues coming from your staff can become an overwhelming task, but it doesn’t have to be. A good managed service provider will have a streamlined way to troubleshoot issues for your staff – usually a help desk that provides much-needed, on-demand support.

Surprise IT costs? We don’t do that.

You don’t want surprise costs or fees, and neither does a trusted IT provider. Their mission is to develop an improved, cost-effective, stable IT budget that aligns with your organization’s goals. 

No path to growth? We scale.

Your technology should promote growth. Outsourcing IT to a managed service provider can give you the ability to scale because you have access to new resources, new talent, and additional support. Technology should never hold your organization back from growth.

When you’re ready for a scalable, stable IT strategy, Dedicated IT will be ready to help. You can leverage our comprehensive approach to IT and our team of in-house IT professionals that are ready to improve your IT function through account management, remote support, and even field service.

Building Your Long-Term Technology Roadmap

What is a technology roadmap and why does your business need one? This is a strategic, living document outlining the technological direction of your business. A good technology roadmap helps communicate the “what” and the “why” of IT to decision makers, and also guides your IT department by providing the master list of IT projects that need to be completed. We recommend developing a technology roadmap with longevity in mind. A three-year plan is a great place to start.

Why Does Your Business Need a Technology Roadmap?

Your decision makers, or even your IT staff, might wonder why you need to go through the process of developing a technology roadmap. Every department at your organizations needs some direction, and a technology roadmap can provide that to IT. It gets everyone on the same page. It changes your IT department from being in reactive, fire-fighting mode to predictable, proactive action. Meetings will transition from deciding what to do to knocking out tasks and roadblocks.

A technology roadmap can be an attractive project to your executives because it budgets technology expenditures and sheds light on what sometimes is boring and unimportant areas of the practice.

How Do You Build a Technology Roadmap?

Dedicated IT builds a three-year technology roadmap for every client during the onboarding process and has honed the development process into seven steps.

1. Conduct a technology assessment. To learn the landscape of your technology, document your assets, inventory, software, licensing, and who uses what types of technology.
2. Complete a Security Risk Assessment. This process will result in a remediation plan, which provides you with categories of risk prioritization.  
3. Assess vendor management. Meet with your vendors to learn exactly what they do for you and what their security and IT best practices are.
4. Talk to your staff. You need to learn from the people who actually use the technology and experience issues daily.
5. Make the technology roadmap document. Consolidate this information you’ve collected thus far and start organizing the items by priority and impact.
6. Prioritize the technology issues you’ve discovered into low, medium, high, and critical items.
7. Finalize your roadmap. Organize it by quarter, knocking out the critical items first. Write a narrative for each item on the roadmap. Determine which projects can be run internally vs. requiring a vendor. Provide an estimate of hours, and the suggested resource for projects that can be handled internally. Present the finalized roadmap to your decision makers.

Pitfalls for Building a Technology Roadmap

Building a technology roadmap is a valuable project that involves several parties. To get the most out of this process, it’s important to follow best practices and avoid pitfalls, including:

1. The foundation of the technology roadmap is based on an IT assessment conducted by a company trying to unseat existing IT vendor or internal IT department.
2. The technology roadmap is too technical or doesn’t align IT projects with business objectives.
3. There is no calibration, alignment, or accountability to the team responsible for the technology roadmap
4. Budget is not accounted for in the technology roadmap.
5. Too many outside or second opinions are taken, rather than making data-driven decisions.
6. There is a lack of long-term vision for how IT can support company goals.
7. The IT leaders are not invited to business discussions.
8. Your IT leader or partner lacks healthcare knowledge.

When you’re ready for a technology roadmap to inform IT strategy, Dedicated IT will be ready to help. As a Dedicated IT client, the first thing we will do is develop a thorough technology roadmap and conduct benchmarking. You will leverage our comprehensive approach to IT and our team of in-house IT professionals that are ready to improve your IT function.