Threatened with the increasing issue of health data breaches, IT leaders at healthcare agencies are growing investments this year in their security infrastructures, in accordance to outcomes of a new survey from IT staffing firm TEKsystems.
Security is a progressive area in the year 2016 in terms of healthcare organization IT budgets, respondents demonstrated. When inquired which technology categories will have the greatest effect on their agencies this year, 60% of respondents demonstrated that security was the top priority in their budgets this year, up from 54% in the year 2015.
In the survey, security edged out business intelligence and big data, highlighted by 58% of respondents; mobility (55%); cloud computing (49%); and consumerization of IT/bring your own device (47%).
“Security is one of our fastest developing technology places because nobody needs their company’s name in the paper linked with a data breach,” claims Mitch Gardner, northeast regional director for TEKsystems Healthcare Services. “If you observe at the other 4 areas—BI/big data, mobility, cloud computing, and BYOD—they all have a huge security component.”
Gardner contends that initiatives regarded to mobile health and sufferer engagement are also drivers for sustained spending in security, provided that wearables and the Internet of Things are beginning to shift how contributors care for their sufferers, bringing with them inherent security susceptibilities.
Securing data and networks has never been more significant for these agencies, because 2015 was a watershed year for healthcare hacking tragedies. In fact, healthcare records for one in 3 Americans were breached previous year, with records of 111 million persons potentially approached by hackers, compared with merely about 1.8 million individuals in the year 2014, in accordance to data analysis released previous month by cybersecurity vendor Bitglass.
And, with an 80% increase in the number of hacks in the year 2015, health IT leaders are not taking chances as they look to beef up security and increase staffing. When TEKsystems inquired HIT executives if they hope 2016 security spending to change, the percentage of IT leaders expecting increases was 73%, compared with 70% in the year 2015.
Karsten Scherer, an analyst with TEKsystems, analyzes that healthcare agencies were definitely concerned about security susceptibilities previous year, but many were not making it a top priority. “It was not that it wasn’t on their radar in the year 2015, but now they are legitimately doing something about it and executing tools for intrusion detection and monitoring, while dealing improper use and access,” Scherer claims. Additionally, he analyzes mHealth and medical devices getting more attention from contributors.
An August 2015 research published in Communications of the ACM discovered that security remains 1 of the most significant concerns because of to the potential threats of cyberattacks on medical devices. For instance, more than two-thirds (69%) of respondents claimed their agency’s IT security does not meet expectations for FDA-approved medical tools.
Although, as healthcare agencies try to increase staffing to bolster security, Scherer discusses that they are having an increasingly complex time finding security professionals with the requisite qualities and experience. Respondents to this year’s TEKsystems survey claimed it was toughest to find information security executives, eclipsing project managers, which was previous year’s hardest position to fill.
Not astonishingly, when inquired whether they hope their IT staff’s security salaries to change this year versus previous year, the percentage of IT leaders expecting increases in the year 2016 was 62% versus 59% in the year 2015.
“While core builder positions are both critical and complicated t to fill, security—critical for all levels of a healthcare IT initiative—has continually increased in significance, and as a result, sustains to maintain its priority as the place where the greatest percentage of healthcare IT leaders are allocating salary increases,” claims TEKsystems’ annual IT forecast, which is deployed on a survey of nearly 100 HIT leaders involving CIOs, vice presidents, directors, as well as hiring managers at healthcare agencies that averaged about $50 million in revenue.
Scherer point out that as security takes on increasing significance for healthcare agencies; there are “few interesting tensions that are initiating to crop up between business executives and conventional IT executives for control.” He summarizes that the “old school CIOs are going to have to rise to the issues or get left behind.”
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