Devices & Hardware News

How BYOD Implementation Impacts Healthcare Security

By Vera Gruessner

- With more smartphone end users incorporating their cell phones as well as other mobile devices into their everyday work, the ongoing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) transformation is affecting businesses across the country along with hospitals, clinics, rehabilitation centers, and other medical facilities. As BYOD implementation takes place throughout the healthcare industry, doctors and nurses in various offices are using their own tablets, smartphones, and laptops to communicate with their team members and patient community.

Patient Data Privacy and Security

However, as BYOD implementation continues to rise throughout businesses around the country, data security will remain a key concern of consumers and stakeholders. In the healthcare industry, patient data privacy and security is especially important, as identity theft could lead to insurance fraud, drug mismanagement, inability to receive timely treatments, and the potential for financial ruin.

One survey from Gartner Inc. shows that cybersecurity practices will evolve and remain diligent toward ensuring data from Internet of Things devices remain protected, according to a company press release. The results show that more than one in five of polled enterprises will have digital security initiatives in place by the end of 2017.

For example, as more mobile devices and wearables are incorporated into the world of healthcare, the need for connectivity and interoperability between the tools will rise. Along with this rise, security practices will need to improve to ensure patient data remains safe and secure.

Internet of Things devices offer new computing solutions to businesses of all kinds, as they are designed for precise purposes and will likely lead to transformations of the healthcare landscape. As such, security oversight may grow more complex in the Internet of Things arena, the release reports.

Internet of Things devices can make a large impact on patient care as well, such as increasing or decreasing the amount of fluids a patient receives based on new information in the electronic health records.

“The IoT [Internet of Things] now penetrates to the edge of the physical world and brings an important new ‘physical’ element to security concerns. This is especially true as billions of things begin transporting data,” Ganesh Ramamoorthy, research vice president at Gartner, stated in the press release. “The IoT redefines security by expanding the scope of responsibility into new platforms, services and directions. Moving forward, enterprises should consider reshaping IT or cybersecurity strategies to incorporate known digital business goals and seek participation in digital business strategy and planning.”

“Ultimately, the requirements for securing the IoT will be complex, forcing CISOs to use a blend of approaches from mobile and cloud architectures, combined with industrial control, automation and physical security,” Ramamoorthy continued. “However CISOs will find that, even though there may be complexity that is introduced by the scale of the IoT use case, the core principles of data, application, network, systems and hardware security are still applicable.”

As the digital health space advances and BYOD implementation takes hold across various medical organizations, it is important to note that the market for mobile content distribution network (CDN) is expected to grow from $2.11 billion in 2015 to $13.4 billion by 2020, according to a Research and Markets press release.

With a stronger sense of BYOD implementation taking place throughout the corporate world, the mobile CDN market is showing some strong growth. The demand for smart mobile devices and the rise in media content is also pushing forward this increase in the mobile CDN field. However, unreliable connectivity is one barrier standing in the way of this market blossoming.

Time will show how strongly BYOD implementation strategies affect both the growth of mobile device markets and security practices throughout healthcare organizations.

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