Feb 09, 2015
As we are sure you’ve heard by now, Anthem Health just had a massive data breach. The announcement on Thursday sent a shock through the healthcare information technology sector, with as many as 80 million people being placed at risk of identity fraud.
Investigators are currently trying to determine how security was breached, who could have done it and what could happen to the stolen information. In the meantime, customers and the media alike have pointed their fingers at Anthem accusing them of negligence or policy breach.
In some cases, data breaches occur because data was compromised from the inside of an organization. In most cases, negligence isn’t to blame. It’s often something the company could not foresee, such as week endpoint security or lack of policies in dealing with unstructured data.
If Anthem is guilty of anything, it’s of not realizing that there would be problems they couldn’t foresee and failing to plan accordingly.
But this data breach isn’t entirely their fault.
The problem with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the healthcare standard for data security, is that it is just a policy. There is no standard for regular testing to ensure network security as there is with other security standards such as PCI DSS in the financial sector. Because of this, old systems and applications are open to more security vulnerabilities without the organizations becoming aware of them.
etherFAX SEN address this problem for healthcare organizations.
Through etherFAX Secure Exchange Network (SEN), organizations can create a private fax network with 100% guaranteed delivery. Unstructured data such as medical notes, authorizations and other patient health information (PHI) is transmitted via etherFAX SEN with end-to-end encryption.
Fax infrastructure is often overlooked within the realm of security and breaches. We enable healthcare organizations and medical groups, insurance companies and billing operators to securely transport data and ensure compliance with government mandated regulations while also subjected to rigorous and regular security tests.
Fully integrating with existing fax servers and applications such as electronic medical record (EMR) solutions and healthcare management systems, we manage healthcare-critical fax communications without capacity constraints.
For more information on how etherFAX SEN can help you, give us a call.