Data safety for your dental practice: The whys and hows!

1. Data safety for your dental practice: The whys and hows! Data theft has been making the news quite a bit off late. ​Dental practices​ manage sensitive patient data and are also responsible for data security as per HIPAA guidelines. These regulations have added a lot of operational hassles with a lot of effort going towards ensuring compliance and allaying the constant fear of potential legal problems. The features to look for while choosing a ​dental practice management system​ are going to sound mostly like technical jargon. We will look at the important ones and see how these features help you secure your data. ● Unique user credentialing: One of the most important steps in ensuring HIPAA compliance and data security is to restrict access to sensitive information for non-essential personnel. Unique user credentialing can help you add users, edit their permissions or even temporarily suspend their access to ensure confidentiality of information. ● Transmission encryption: One of the points where data is most vulnerable is during transmission. All your data passes through your ISP and further through various public channels. ​Cloud-based platforms employ end to end encryption using strong protocols to ensure the data, even if breached will not make sense to the attacker. Look for SSL encryption to protect your data when it is in transmission against all kinds of threats. ● Audit trails: Keeping track of who edited what and when is necessary, through a comprehensive HIPAA compliant audit log. This ensures the ability to backtrack any breach to the person responsible and acts as a deterrent to such acts. ● Secure communications: It is also important to look at the tools you can use for internal communication. Most of the data security-related news we see today is linked to internal communication being hacked. Choose a system that enables users across locations and roles to exchange messages, notes, and documents in a secure manner.

2. ● Automatic log off: Forgetting to log-off is a human error that is hard to prevent. The best way to safeguard against this is to be able to set customizable timers to automatically log off users after a period of inactivity. ● Continuous monitoring: Apart from all the preventive measures, it is also necessary to be able to mount a quick response to any active threats. Ensure that your system has continuous monitoring to assess requests in real-time and get notified for any suspicious activity. For more details​​visit us​!