Security Risk Assessment Important for Your Practice

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Security Risk Assessment Important for Your Practice

HIPAA compliance and data security are critically important ingredients for a healthcare practice, or else legal hurdles could easily sap the resources and reputation of an institution founded by the hard work and dedication of doctors, surgeons and other healthcare professionals. That’s why it is important to take steps towards greater and greater security and review those steps every now and then. You really can’t be sure that security measures at your practice are foolproof.

Why You Need a Security Risk Assessment In other words, in your practice it is important to perform a security risk assessment to stay safe and avoid adverse circumstances. You must remember that HIPAA violation penalties could make your institution poorer by up to $50,000. This could be compounded by litigation by CALL US

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wronged patients, or patients who have the slightest feeling that they’ve been compromised.

What It Takes Securing your practice is a challenge in itself, but all it requires is a systematic approach. The greatest challenge here is to conceive an overall vision for securing your practice. It involves detailing all the processes and technologies involved as well as the stakeholders and risks associated. This is important for implementing proper controls which would ultimately help reduce the risk to the protected information assets.

Security risk assessment involves a review of existing controls against best practices and quantifying the risks for creating a road map. This would result in comprehensively assessing the security program of the organization and creating a road map and recovery plan. The assessment ensures the security of an organization, the alignment of its business and compliance drivers, and a critical and unbiased perspective on the security posture of the organization.

Assessing Drivers and Objectives The first step in security risk assessment has to be discovering your organization’s drivers and objectives. These need to be identified quite early in the assessment process for the latter to be truly beneficial to the requirements of the organization. The assessment also needs to extend beyond regulatory requirements, to ensure that the organization’s sensitive CALL US

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information assets are really being protected. It’s at this discovery stage that all this information will need to be collected – staffing, fiscal responsibility, business objectives, regulatory drivers and operational drivers, among others.

Discovery and Assessment of Safeguards After this information is collected, the data, including the drivers behind it, must be understood and its life cycle determined. This would make the discovery stage the longest stage of risk assessment.

The next step involves examining the physical, technical and administrative safeguards in place against security breaches and the organizational and procedural documentation requirements. This specifically deals with HIPAA compliance.

Drawing up a Plan After the security breach safeguards have been assessed, a list of things that are good as well as those that need to be improved must be drawn up.

Recommendations must be made to deal with the weaknesses and improve the things that need to be. They should be categorized based on their strategic nature and urgency. Longer term recommendations might require investment and infrastructure influx.

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Reviewing the Plan The final stage involves the review of all the recommendations. Their suitability must be gauged and they must be aligned with the vision and functioning of the business. A planned security risk assessment would lend important information to stakeholders which would help them make vital decisions for the protection of their important information assets. The security initiatives must be fully in line with business drivers for the former to be really successful. Such initiatives will inevitably evolve with evolving legislation and standards, and new technologies.

No amount of measures is enough when it comes to data security for a healthcare concern. But a security risk assessment program can help identify most issues and keep the institution a safe distance away from HIPAA violations and litigation.

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