Achieving and Maintaining Compliance in Healthcare

The healthcare industry is undergoing a rapid digital transformation, fueled by innovative technologies that promise to improve patient care, streamline operations, and reduce costs. A few IT trends shaping the future of healthcare include an expanding list of medical devices, AI and Machine Learning for diagnosis and treatment, and telehealth and remote patient monitoring. The healthcare industry continues to face increasing challenges in ensuring the security and privacy of patient data.

In 2023, more than 88 million healthcare records were compromised in data breaches, marking a substantial 239% surge from the previous year. The financial impact on healthcare organizations was significant, with the average cost of data breaches reaching nearly $11 million.

Compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is not only a legal requirement but also essential for maintaining the trust of patients and avoiding costly penalties. For those organizations that contract with the US Dept of Health and Human Services, compliance with Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) is also required.

Managing and securing all endpoints play a crucial role in ensuring HIPAA compliance and the mandate to protect personal health information (ePHI). Although HIPAA does not specify exact controls or tools, HIPAA does specify what healthcare organizations should do to protect patient data rather than how it is accomplished. This provides the necessary flexibility for compliance for a national network of hospitals and a small family practice.

HCL BigFix has helped healthcare providers and health plans achieve and maintain HIPAA compliance. HIPAA requirements associated with endpoint management and security include:

Risk Analysis: HIPAA requires covered entities to conduct a comprehensive risk analysis to identify potential vulnerabilities, threats, and risks to ePHI. With HCL BigFix, covered entities can:

• Ensure that IT has visibility to all endpoints from a single management platform.
• Leverage threat information provided by CISA and MITRE to detect and report on vulnerabilities across all endpoints, including laptops, desktops, servers and mobile devices.
• Assess current compliance levels based on standards and benchmarks like CIS, PCI, DISA STIG and others.
• Ensure continuous compliance with automatic remediation and no ad hoc scanning!
• Provide near real time patch and compliance reporting.
• Ensure all installed software is licensed and unauthorized software is identified and removed.
• Monitor new IP addresses of endpoints on the network, ensuring that HCL BigFix quickly manages, updates and secures all endpoints.

Administrative and Technical Safeguards: Covered entities need to implement administrative and technical safeguards to ensure security and the proper management of endpoints. With HCL BigFix, covered entities can:

• Detects and remediate threats identified by vulnerability scanners such as Tenable, Qualys and Rapid7 and by threat intelligence sources such as CISA and MITRE.
• Monitor that endpoints to ensure they are operating in a healthy state, for example, ensuring the antivirus and other security applications are constantly running and up to date.
• Ensure all devices on the network are configured according to the organization's security policies, and optionally quarantine non-compliant endpoints until they are in compliance.
• Create a software asset inventory to ensure that unauthorized software is identified and removed.
• Enable granular administrator rights and two-factor authentication
• Maintain visibility, control and reporting of all endpoints, including laptops, desktops, servers and mobile devices from a single console.

Covered entities must regularly assess and update their endpoint management and security practices to address emerging threats and technologies, and to comply with evolving HIPAA regulations. BigFix has helped healthcare providers and health plans by delivering an integrated comprehensive endpoint management and security solutions that help covered entities achieve and maintain HIPAA compliance that ensures ePHI is protected. In fact, HCL announced two new offerings: HCL BigFix Workspace+, an all-in-one endpoint management and security solution for users and their devices, and HCL BigFix Enterprise+, an all-in-one endpoint management and security solution for infrastructure servers. Both include the patch, compliance and vulnerability management capabilities that support HIPAA and FISMA compliance and protect ePHI.

Download the whitepaper, Managing and Securing Endpoints in Healthcare.

Contact us to discover how HCL BigFix can secure your healthcare endpoints and safeguard patient data.