Improving Health Center Cybersecurity: Risk Assessment, Breach Defense, Mitigation and Response - Session 4: Cybersecurity Incident Response Planning for Health Centers

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 4: Cybersecurity Incident Response Planning for Health Centers

According to IBM's annual Cost of Data Breach Report, the average cost of a data breach for a healthcare organization is more than $10 million. Having a well-documented cybersecurity incident response plan is essential and required for all Health Centers due to the sensitivity of the patient data they are responsible for maintaining. The cost and damage caused by a data breach is often exorbitant, but a strategic incident plan can help to significantly mitigate such effects, and potentially, prevent them from occurring in the first place. This session will provide an overview of incident response planning requirements for health centers and review established workflows for common incident response scenarios such as ransomware attacks.