Dental Office Cybersecurity in Lafayette, LA
Essential Dental Office Cybersecurity to Protect Your Practice and Your Patients
As dental offices incorporate increasingly more technology in their practices, they’ve also increasingly become the targets of cyberattacks. In the past, installing some anti-virus software and a firewall were enough to protect sensitive data from hackers, but as technology gets more sophisticated, so do the people trying to exploit it.
Today's dental offices use practice management software to power their billing, appointment scheduling and record-keeping (e.g. electronic health records, or EHRs, and electronic medical records, or EMRs.) All of these create additional vulnerabilities to your sensitive data from cyber threats.
In light of this, protecting your dental practice and your patients requires a more comprehensive, multi-pronged and–yes–sophisticated cybersecurity solutions plan.
Why Dental Office Cybersecurity Is So Critical
Without a holistic approach to dental office cybersecurity, your systems could fall prey to malware attacks that could compromise and, even, shut down your network and ransomware attacks that could cost you vastly more money than any cybersecurity solutions.
Your reputation with patients and your compliance with the US Department of Health and Human Services depends on your ability to safeguard their trust. Preventing cyberattacks and protecting patients' personal information is how you do it.
Pillars of Dental Office Cybersecurity
There are four pillars of cybersecurity for dental practices:
- Cybersecurity Audit - Your dental practice and dental office IT team work with a cybersecurity company to assess your current technologies and processes.
- Cybersecurity Awareness Training - Your IT team and cybersecurity company train your team to prevent exposing practice or patient data and meet HIPAA security rule requirements.
- Vulnerability Scanning - Cybersecurity solutions experts scan your systems for potential vulnerabilities.
- Penetration Testing - A white-hat (or ethical) hacker attempts to hack your network in order to identify remaining cybersecurity risks to address.
How to Protect Your Dental Office Cybersecurity
There are many cybersecurity solutions you can put to work to protect your dental practice and your patients from cyberattacks.
- Back up all your data, and get in the practice of utilizing your backups.
- Deploy multi-factor authentication (MFA) to tighten access to your networks and systems.
- Consider using a virtual private network (VPN) to scan and monitor all incoming and outgoing data transmissions and confine employee access to only the parts of the network each respective employee needs to access to perform their work.
- Train all your employees in proper cybersecurity practices. Make sure, for example, that no employee uses the office network or systems to conduct personal business.
- And most importantly, work with a reputable and time-tested cybersecurity solutions company.
To get started assessing your needs and devising the best cybersecurity plan for your dental practice accordingly, give us a call at Centric Services in Lafayette, LA.