Physician Practice

Public comments sought on new guide offering best practices to secure health data on mobile devices

Physician Practice Insider, August 11, 2015

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) is publishing a new series of guides to show healthcare professionals and organizations how to improve their cybersecurity measures to protect health information systems with standards-based, commercially available, or open-source tools.
 
The NCCoE released a draft version of the first guide in the series, “Securing Electronic Records on Mobile Devices,” July 23 for public comment. The step-by-step guide demonstrates how to use smartphones or tablets for patient care without spreading sensitive data across the digital stratosphere.
 
The NCCoE points out the use of mobile devices to store, access, and transmit electronic health records has greatly outpaced strong privacy and security protections on those devices.
 
The guide was developed by cybersecurity experts, and corresponds with HIPAA guidelines and best practices from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It offers IT and security officers a detailed blueprint they can either copy or recreate with similar technologies.
 
“The NCCoE was established specifically to help organizations solve real-world challenges, and this was one of particular concern to the healthcare community,” said NCCoE Director Donna Dodson in a statement. “This guide can help providers protect critical patient information without getting in the way of delivering quality care.”
 
The draft document and form for comments is available at the NCCoE website. Comments are due September 25 and can be emailed to hit_nccoe@nist.gov.
 
This article originally appeared in HCPro’s HIPAA Update blog.

Most Popular