Achieving HIPAA Compliance Requires a Comprehensive Cyber Strategy

Keeping up with healthcare security and meeting requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a complex, ongoing process. Even so, once achieved, compliance is not enough to ensure the security of your network. Organizations benefit from expert, third-party assistance in developing, implementing, and managing an information security program to address HIPAA requirements and the broader cyber risks to healthcare providers.

Delta Risk can be an objective advisor to test your HIPAA compliance program against regulatory requirements. Our team of certified security professionals has in-depth knowledge of the unique challenges healthcare organizations face. We deliver a full suite of professional services to help you address your information security program, manage your technical security needs, and cope with the effects of a breach, if necessary.

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HIPAA Security Program Assessments

Testing the strength of your information security program is an important step for your patients, business partners, and other third-party associates. Our assessments review your current program, outline its strengths, and deliver a comprehensive analysis, including a detailed action plan to rectify weaknesses and tackle your most critical needs. Our assessments include:

• HIPAA Program Assessment
• HIPAA Risk Analysis
• Security Program Maturity Review
• Defense Assessment
• Third-party Vendor Assessments

We can tailor our assessments to evaluate your information security program against HIPAA criteria or best practices of the ISO/IEC standards. We can also advise your organization on the best methods of balancing compliance and risk management against resource constraints.

Our advisory services do not stop with paper assessments. Delta Risk also offers a host of red-team and tabletop exercises to test your cyber security program in replicated real-world scenarios. We will customize these exercises to the specific requirements of HIPAA and the threats currently facing healthcare organizations. They can include services such exercises as penetration testing, cyber security exercises, and cyber threat hunting.

Healthcare Managed Security Services

Delta Risk’s Security Operations Center (SOC) as-a-Service (SOCaaS) and managed security services allow your business to nimbly strengthen its security program to meet crucial healthcare information security needs and protect your network, cloud applications and infrastructure, and endpoints.

Incident Response Services

In the event that a breach does happen, Delta Risk offers a variety of incident response services to help healthcare companies respond. These services can help a healthcare organization fulfill its HIPAA requirements under 45 C.F.R. § 164.308. Delta Risk can hunt for current or undiscovered threats on your network, coach your team through difficult decisions after a breach, and provide a response team with a host of capabilities to deal with the threat. These capabilities and related preemptive planning services include:

• Business Impact Analysis
• Disaster Recovery Planning
• Incident Response Planning

Cyber Threats in Healthcare

The requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) are the initial cause of many healthcare organizations concerns about the effectiveness of their cyber security strategy.

Not long ago, you would believe the information you gave to a doctor or hospital was confidential and secure. Times have predictably changed. Now, the protected health information (PHI) you give to healthcare providers is a major target of cyber criminals.

Many people think that cyber thieves target credit card information; however, this type of information is now less valuable on the digital black market because of the massive number of stolen card number and the victim’s ability to easily deactivate them.

Unlike a card number, you cannot “deactivate” your personal health records. Furthermore, healthcare providers link this information with other valuable data (e.g. payment information, insurance carriers, etc.) which makes PHI a promising target for cyber criminals. Once malicious actors obtain PHI, they can sell it for others to use, file false claims for money, or even use it to get healthcare for themselves.

Theft of PHI is not always the main issue. The goal of regulations in this field is to protect the confidentiality of private patient information, not necessarily to stop malicious hackers. Careless employees and the ease of accessing information through mobile devices therefore “threaten” healthcare organizations’ HIPAA compliance efforts.

Additionally, healthcare providers require round-the-clock access to their information and networks. Because of this reliance, hackers have developed ways of exploiting it. Incidents of ransomware (malware installed on computers that holds the information or networks for ransom) are on the rise.