Healthcare’s Top IT Mobility Risk – And What You Can Do About It

A mobile, untethered workforce is becoming essential in order for extended care facilities to deliver the highest level of care possible to residents. The flexibility and freedom that are hallmarks of IT mobility make it easier to communicate with residents, solve and report problems as they happen and to closely monitor critical health data. Staffers are able to perform those services and tasks independent of specific locations, devices and connections.

The upsides may be plentiful, but they come with their fair share of challenges. One study, Check Point’s “The Impact of Mobile Devices on Information Security: A Survey of IT Professionals,” laid out some of the issues most commonly faced by IT leaders whose organizations are implementing mobility initiatives like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). These include:

• Securing corporate information (67%)
• Tracking and controlling access to corporate and private networks (63%)
• Managing personal devices that contain corporate and personal data and applications (59%)
• Keeping device operating systems and applications updated (38%)
• Finding agnostic security solutions (e.g., managing all OSes) (14%)

How is mobility endangering corporate data security? According to Check Point’s study, the biggest reason is employees losing their mobile devices either by theft or by simply misplacing them. This took the top spot, besting downloading malicious applications, connecting to unsecured Wi‐Fi and poor web-browsing habits.

That observation was supported by a separate study, the 2014 Healthcare Breach Report from Bitglass. This study found over two-thirds (68%) of all healthcare data breaches which have occurred since 2010 can be chalked up to device theft or loss. So even facilities who’ve hardened against assaults from exterior hackers could still be at risk for losing resident’s data thanks to old-fashioned criminals or forgetful staffers.

Increase flexibility without sacrificing security

In extended care, just like the rest of the healthcare field, government regulations such as HIPAA reign supreme. The security of the private medical data of residents must be of the upmost importance or else facilities could feel the sting of harsh fines – in addition to lost trust and negative publicity. This holds true whether data is stored on high-tech servers or employees’ personal devices.

A partner like Arraya Solutions can help your organization deploy a secure, scalable and powerful mobility environment. What Arraya can’t do is physically keep thieves out of your facility or stop employees from losing devices which house critical data. But there’s hope.

Arraya’s team is well-versed in solutions that can perform remote wipes. For example, some solutions allow IT to control anything corporate-related on an employee’s device, while maintaining a hands-off approach to anything personal. There are multiple ways IT can leverage this ability to its advantage, including with terminated employees. Instead of having to track a person down to wipe his/her device, IT can take care of it remotely, making everyone’s lives easier and keeping data secure.

This ability can also come in handy when – you guessed it – a device is lost or stolen. Considering the thorn this issue seems to be becoming for many in healthcare according to the studies above, being able to wipe devices remotely could prove to be invaluable. In essence, with this function, your facility will be protecting the data itself as opposed to the device or the connection.

Not only can Arraya help you implement the necessary solutions to accomplish that, it can support them for the long haul, all via its Managed Services capabilities. Arraya’s Managed Services are intended to expand on the knowledge and talents of existing IT teams. Managed Services take infrastructure, storage, network, help desk projects and more off IT’s plate, freeing personnel to work on other, more pressing, projects.

To learn more about how Arraya’s Managed Services can increase the flexibility, responsiveness and reliability of IT or about the positive impact a mobility solution can have at your extended care facility, visit us at www.ArrayaSolutions.com or reach out to an Arraya Account Executive today.

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