As enterprise security executives working other industries know, healthcare security needs to look inward in addition to considering patients and visitors when it comes to protection strategies.
No matter lessons learned from previous incidents, healthcare facilities continue to embarrassingly report laptops and flash drives containing patient information misplaced, lost and stolen, even in the face of increased regulatory procedures demanding more and better security through the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and the more recent Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act.
From inside medical centers and through outside medical and therapy practices, multi-millions of dollars are being fraudulently taken but government prosecutors are getting tougher.
For healthcare security executives, bomb threats often come out of the blue or from disgruntled current and former employees. But some can come from a disgruntled patient.
An emergency operations plan (EOP) provides the structure and processes that a healthcare facility and its security and safety operation use to respond to and initially recover from an event. The EOP is therefore the response and recovery component of an emergency management program.
Healthcare security and safety executives have more in common than they have differences and share more of their core mission than enterprise security leaders serving other industries.
A recent Ponemon institute survey reported that while the cost for data breaches is trending downward, this does not apply to stolen healthcare information.
Government regulators are beginning a three-year program focusing on protecting workers in the nursing and residential care fields from serious safety and health hazards, according to an OSHA news brief.
