Improving Health Center Cybersecurity: Risk Assessment, Breach Defense, Mitigation and Response - Session 3: Mitigating Cybersecurity Risk for Remote Patient Monitoring and Telehealth Programs

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 3: Mitigating Cybersecurity Risk for Remote Patient Monitoring and Telehealth Programs

Patients and health centers use and depend on technology more and more each day. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend and introduced additional technologies to solve emerging problems like remote monitoring for patients with chronic disease and broad adoption of telehealth. As these new tools are introduced and integrated to address acute and future needs, it becomes critically important to ensure that patients' data remains secure. This session will discuss recommendations and strategies for assessing risk and improving cybersecurity policies and procedures in relation to RPM and telehealth.