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Do IT Pros in the Healthcare Industry Have it Toughest?

Posted by Tamara for Progress
General Networking Healthcare Industry IT

It’s not too surprising that among those in IT, it’s IT pros who work within the healthcare industry that arguably have the hardest jobs. Not only must they support their orgs in avoiding hacks and breaches but they must comply with HIPAA and ensure patient data is protected. It’s one reason why having a thorough understanding of network topology and employing a reliable network monitoring solution is so essential.

Our recent blog post highlighted some of the most pressing challenges facing healthcare IT currently including:

  • Compliance with HIPAA
  • Cost-cutting initiatives
  • The implementation of electronic health record systems and electronic medical record systems
We recommend that IT pros within the healthcare industry implement network monitoring to capture, analyze, and report on the comprehensive data logged for their entire system. Having a detailed history of network logs can be beneficial in the event of a breach and can be useful as an audit trail.

Additionally, data collected by the network monitoring solution enhances understanding, action, and network planning. For healthcare, reports are critical to proving compliance, and showing what remediation actions were taken in the event of a breach. Monitoring alerts can also show when configuration changes have occurred and are often the first sign of hacker activity. Even when these changes are benign, “60% of network outages and perhaps an even larger number of breaches are due to misconfiguration errors” and alerts can keep critical systems running smoothly.

To view more details and actual case studies, please see our full blog post on this topic.

What other challenges make healthcare IT the toughest job?
Please share your thoughts and expertise with a reply below.
Spice (10) Reply (3)
Tamara for Progress

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3 Replies

  • We're pharma, and yeah we're just about as bad. Still have HIPPA stuff to deal with, with customer records, plus FDA regs. Everything related to product must be validated. The validation process is kind of antiquated and does not completely define virtualization, nor the advantages of full system state virtual backups.

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  • Yes, healthcare IT has a lot of rules to follow. But the financial services sector, especially banking, has all those same rules and practices AND gets the fun of mandatory, regular audits and government examinations. In the US, healthcare isn't necessarily audited/examined to the same degree. Maybe larger healthcare orgs have audits and exams, but I know smaller providers don't, at least not in Washington state.

    So I'd say banking has it the toughest. It doesn't matter how small the bank is, they get audited and examined regularly. Auditors and examiners will ALWAYS find something wrong.

    (As an MSP, I provide IT services for both healthcare and financial institutions.)

    Spice (1) flagReport
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    • What's your definition of tough resp. toughest IT job?
    And not all healthcare organizations are equal. Some have to apply more regulation than others. A large hospital of national infrastructure with own internal production of drugs and intensive care departments has to comply with much more regulation then a small general practitioner.
    And I fear that an IT job at either the Chernobyl nuclear power plant during Russian occupation or attack or at Europes largest nuclear power plant in Ukraine during Russian attack and occupation seem to be much harder. There was a time when the Russians did not allow shift changes. And they stole and removed servers during operation at least at the Chernobyl plant.
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