In a panic, people cut corners, and while healthcare professionals are far from panicking in the rising battle against coronavirus it’s only natural that some might cut corners, when it comes to things such as accessing patient records, in the name of saving valuable time.
That’s the backdrop for the recent announcement by CynergisTek that it has updated its Patient Privacy Monitoring Services to help providers be more proactive in identifying hospital insiders seeking information they're unauthorized to access about coronavirus and COVID-19.
While CynergisTek’s specialized privacy and security experts have been using unique tools, techniques, and procedures to support the ongoing privacy of patients through the standard PPMS services, to serve their clients more thoroughly CynergisTek says it has put in place customized rules, built around artificial intelligence and behavioral analytics, to specifically identify insider behavior related to the coronavirus and COVID-19.
"Our clients are on the frontline of the COVID-19 response," said CynergisTek CEO Caleb Barlow in a statement. "As they scale, they are opening up access to medical records for staff and vendors that are working remotely, turning up temporary facilities, and deploying telemedicine solutions. Each of these initiatives comes with inherent security and privacy risks.”
As our colleague Mike Miliard points out at HealthcareITNews, “insider snooping is a major concern for hospital security leaders, even in normal times. When celebrity patients such as Kim Kardashian and George Clooney are involved – or headline-grabbing phenomena like coronavirus – the privacy stakes are even high higher. Given that coronavirus is probably the most discussed topic in the world at the moment (and celebrities such as Tom Hanks, NBA players and the first lady of Canada now being diagnosed), health systems have to be on guard for potential insider breaches.”
As part of the service, CynergisTek will use AI to proactively identify aberrant activity within the medical record, support the health system with related investigations, and provide training to reduce the overall number of patient privacy violations across the enterprise. Through these methods, CynergisTek can support an organization’s needs as it relates to protecting the privacy of patients impacted by the ongoing coronavirus/COVID-19 situation.
The PPMS service – which is provided by a team located in CynergisTek’s Austin, Texas-based Privacy Operations Center – can effectively identify and manage client privacy incidents using near real-time data with a low rate of false positives.
Said CynergisTek’s Barlow, “We started scaling our Privacy Operations Center in November of last year and we are leveraging that additional capacity to handle inbound requests for privacy monitoring related to COVID-19.”