Improving Health Center Cybersecurity: Risk Assessment, Breach Defense, Mitigation and Response - Session 1: Identifying and Assessing Cybersecurity Risks at Your Health Center

HITEQ Learning Collaborative Series

It's time to reconsider your strategy if you still treat cyber risk as an annual project or initiative. Having a thorough ongoing program in place means that even in the worst-case scenario, you'll be ready to demonstrate that you did what was reasonable and appropriate to protect your systems and patient data. Nothing can guarantee that a cyberattack won't become a breach. Health Centers are a domain with a high potential for data breaches. As a result, it is crucial for health center leadership to adopt breach prevention strategies across their entire organization, as opposed to relegating it to the IT department. 

To support health centers in their cybersecurity strategy and implementation, the HITEQ Center is offering a free learning collaborative -- Improving Health Center Cybersecurity: Risk Assessment, Breach Defense, Mitigation, and Response. This learning collaborative will involve four structured virtual learning sessions. During the series participants will engage with subject matter experts and their colleagues in peer-to-peer learning and discussion. Topics will include: health center breach mitigation tactics, operationalizing cybersecurity to better mitigate risks, telehealth risk management strategies, and incident response planning from a cybersecurity perspective.

After participating in this session, attendees will be able to:

• Describe resources, frameworks, and methods for strategic implementation of cybersecurity infrastructure and services.
• Describe essential cybersecurity tools and services that can help decrease the risk of a data breach.
• Use best practices in cybersecurity when implementing modern telehealth tools and RPM initiatives.
• Adopt cybersecurity risk management paradigms and incident response planning templates.

Session 1: Identifying and Assessing Cybersecurity Risks at Your Health Center

In the kick-off to our cybersecurity learning collaborative, we will seek to build knowledge and increase Health Centers' capacity to effectively prepare for and defend against the current onslaught of malware and ransomware attacks being levied against them. Participants will look at ways to build cybersecurity infrastructure through risk management frameworks and strategic risk assessment, with a focus on protecting information across the whole organization.