Protecting personal and sensitive data in the healthcare industry
Medical data records are usually stored electronically, and as a result, cybersecurity breaches are increasingly common. Data privacy has taken place at the forefront of the healthcare sector, with technology rapidly advancing to ensure that your sensitive and medical data is secure.
What exactly is classified as personal and sensitive data?
Within the context of healthcare, personal and sensitive data generally refers to any and all medical history, current diagnoses and treatments, such as:
Physical and mental health conditions
Prescribed medication
Addictions
Eating disorders
Treatments after suffering violence or abuse
Personal details held about patients including addresses, phone numbers and other contact details
In short, the majority of information held by medical facilities regarding their patients or other end-users could be considered personal or sensitive data.
Healthcare data legislation across the world
In the US, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) set out rules that applied to all healthcare-related electronic transactions, with the aim of improved data security. HIPAA guidelines state that medical records and other individually identifiable health information must be carefully protected and cannot be shared without the patient’s consent.
While HIPAA applies exclusively to the US, other countries have similar rules in place. In the UK, the NHS and other healthcare facilities must comply with the Data Protection Act and UK GDPR. Across the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets guidelines for data privacy, including the collection, storage, processing and sharing of medical records.
Data breaches and protection
Hospitals have repeatedly suffered cyberattacks, targeting medical IT systems in order to access patient data. In recent years, however, video security has also become an issue. In 2021 Bloomberg reported that a group of hackers claimed to have accessed footage from 150,000 surveillance cameras inside hospitals, healthcare clinics and other organisations.
Protecting data and ensuring patients’ and practitioners’ privacy as they access healthcare facilities have become a top priority, but data security can be a major expense that is often passed onto end-users.
The solution: automated video redaction software
As it is vital that health organisations improve personal data protection without over-spending, sophisticated data-protection software solutions such as Secure Redact have provided easily-managed, cost-effective data protection tools.
Our video privacy platform is powered by machine learning algorithms to provide automated video redaction, to automatically detect personal data for anonymisation. Useful in the healthcare industry to protect patient privacy, it blurs identifying information from medical footage, such as faces, licence plates and personal data.
The capacity to adhere to privacy laws like HIPAA is one of the key advantages of adopting automated video redaction in the healthcare industry. Automated redaction helps to ensure that private data is not inadvertently revealed, lowering the chance of privacy violations. Our world-leading algorithms mean that unblurring video footage is not an option for anyone or hackers, thus eliminating the worry of re-identification.