Dental Practices and Cybersecurity as it Pertains to Patient Records

[Kurk]

Practicing dentists,

One issue I've recently been thinking about is hackings at small dental practices. Google "dental office hacked" and you'll find plenty of stories about dentists having their patient record databases hacked and held for ransom. One dentist had to spend $70,000 dollars fixing the problem.

Now I have enough of an understanding of computers to not to put patient records on computers connected to the same network that your patients or even staff are using, but I'm no cybersecurity IT person.

Because these hackings and the digitalization of patient files have only become prevalent in the past decade or so, I wanted to know what sort of potential costs and headaches a newly established dental office might have to go through in 2017 as it relates to cybersecurity. Do you use a third party company? Do you have your own IT person? How much extra overhead cost does it add?

It's scary to think that I could be sued for big bucks if my office's database was hacked and patient records exposed.

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[FanOfCostco]

Shouldn't you be working on getting your bio grade up

 

[2TH MVR]

That's actually a good question. I've been hacked a few times. Very frustrating. Thankfully no ransom or anything like that.
Essentially the hacker was using my server in one of my practices as a "zombie" server. In other words .... they were using my IP address to send out their spam. I had no idea what was happening until my internet provider notified me and gave me a couple of weeks to correct the problem or they were going to shut off my internet service.

My IT person then had to clean the server. Not an easy task nor was it inexpensive.

Here's food for thought. Doesn't matter what precautions you take. There will always be a smarter hacker out there that can find a way onto your network server. A month later .... the hacker was back. This was AFTER my IT person had loaded the server up with all the latest protection software.
My solution? I disconnected the modem every time we left the office. Apparently the hacker got tired of the interrupted connectivity of our server and left my server alone.

I hear the cloud is safer.