Dr. Kolodner invited the medical informatics community to a Town Hall in D.C. last week to discuss medical identity theft. Privacy concerns made it to the front page of the September issue of Healthcare ITNews, a reputable and well read publication. Hoooray!
This is exciting news - selling privacy and security solutions has much of the same feeling as advertising root-canal treatments (I have to guess, being not a Dentist): people know when it has to be done, but nobody is excited about it. Which is why IT security is an unwelcome topic often dealt with by buying Firewall and spam blocker appliances to keep bad people outside.
But those who follow the annual CSI report about computer security know that about 50% of damage caused by security violations is attributed to insiders. Provided that a new set of laws increases liability for record snooping, damages caused by insiders deserve even more attention.
Medical Identity theft, now seriously investigated by the federal government, is also a serious crime. Given the 48 million uninsured and millions more with insufficient insurance coverage, there is a large market for fraudulent access to health benefits. Prevention of medical identity theft is an information security challenge against both insider and outside attackers.
In this context, I posted Friday an invitation to attend a webinar in which you can learn more about a solution provided by our partner FairWarning. Just like a Firewall, the FairWarning solution plugs into different environments and starts to work in the background. Leveraging technology like MySQL, FairWarning detects suspicious access patterns while they occur and can alert IT staff about potential policy violations. This is much better than discovering violations months after the fact in an audit, when liability might already have been triggered. The cool thing about FairWarning is how it can be pre-configured for a specific customer and be deployed in a short time - a true appliance.
So - once more - please register for the webinar to learn more and stay tuned for more IT security solutions for Healthcare from the Sun Industry team.
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