IT experts in health care environments are essential operational pillars. They keep patients safe as the world continues to digitize. They also make sure their care happens faster by protecting important data. Part of this responsibility includes occasionally destroying information. When should facilities engage in data destruction, and what are the best ways to execute it?
Why Is Data Destruction Critical for Hospitals?
Getting rid of medical information about patients, medicines and staff may seem like a disruption to quality care. The contrary is true, as data minimization and destruction provide tons of benefits for all.
Compliance Adherence
Frameworks like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) include data destruction requirements as part of adherence. Critical infrastructure, like hospitals and medical facilities, are some of the most vulnerable to compromises and privacy breaches.
In 2023, over 100 million people were affected by health care-related cyberthreats. Therefore, HIPAA recommends nonessential information be deleted or discarded to improve health systems.
Anything that falls under personally identifying information (PII) may need to be eradicated, including imaging, pharmaceutical records, billing statements, claims information and more. Destruction frequency varies depending on the type of institution. For example, it would not serve a blood donor registry to delete information every year or even 10.
Legal Protections
Periodically destroying documents defends customers against threat actors. It also keeps hospitals safe from legal action. There are fines for violating privacy oversights, which would be in addition to accumulated fees from lawsuits. A health care organization must avoid these scares for financial security.
Organizational Trust
The fewer negative headlines that appear about a hospital, the better reputation it will have. Patients want to know the enterprise cares about them.
Medical stakeholders must communicate with their patients how they handle and destroy data to perpetuate ethical, trustworthy values. Otherwise, health care workers will have to apologize for thousands of people’s medical and genetic information being posted for cheap on the dark web.
Comprehensive Care
Can hospitals say they provide complete medical care from triage to treatment if everything about the patient is easy to steal or exploit? Though it may not be widely recognized, preserving and destroying data on a schedule is a part of patient care — just as much as issuing a prescription. Extricated PII could put patients’ health at risk as much as a virus.
What Are the Best Practices Medical IT Teams Should Use?
IT teams have numerous methods to dispose of sensitive electronic medical records. These are the most reliable and accessible.
Develop a Destruction Policy
Implementing data destruction practices may only happen with documentation and planning. The policy should be accessible only by those authorized to destroy data, and every step must abide by any compliances the hospital follows, including HIPAA, NIST 800-88, GDPR or ISO.
There must be strict change management procedures in place to make sure impulsive changes do not fracture the plan. The rest of the plan can include any of the following:
- Scheduled audits to review the plan’s efficacy
- Data classification levels to determine what demands each type of sensitive data needs
- Disposal methods
- Contact information for compliance auditors or management teams to receive destruction approvals
- Business continuity plans in the event of a breach
- Destruction logs
Physical Destruction
Many documents are not in digital format at all. Filing cabinets, desk drawers and countless other nooks in medical buildings contain stray photos and identifying documents. Teams must shred these and send them to privacy-compliant paper recyclers. Shredding consciously is crucial for preventing e-waste and disposing of records and electronics in the most sustainable way possible.
Some hospital equipment is not connected to cloud servers or other equipment. This means that certain machines may be the only source and storage place for particular data. If it is out of date or compromised, sometimes crushing, incinerating, dismantling or melting the technology is the only way to be certain hackers cannot tamper with it.
Degaussing is another popular physical destruction technique. It demagnetizes magnet-based storage, such as hard drives. It causes all data on the device to be irretrievable.
Data-Wiping Software
Numerous software options exist to automate destruction activities on a predetermined schedule. Health care facilities must verify the legitimacy and security practices if sourcing applications from third-party vendors.
Strict Access Controls and Minimization
While destroying data protects patients and employees, having less information to sift through is even better. Data minimization is a key aspect of several global compliances, which means hospitals only collect and keep the information they truly need.
This makes information the facility keeps all the more valuable, so it needs to be safeguarded and accessed by few. Institute these access controls to make sure less data comes in to be more precise about what gets deleted:
- Least privilege: Only allowing the least amount of people access to sensitive information.
- Multifactor authentication: Requiring multiple identity authentication measures, including PINs, biometrics and more.
- Immutable certificates: Documentation proving how, when and who was responsible for destruction should be in unchangeable formats, regardless of access controls.
Other Digital Destruction Tactics
While software can be helpful, teams may want to do more manual destruction work. Other ways to tackle data include overwriting and cryptography, though this may require targeted staff training to integrate into business practices.
Data Destruction Is a Type of Health Care
While bytes of data may seem trivial when compared to chemotherapy or a surgical plan, it is a critical component of modern health care. IT teams in medical facilities must fight for investments in ethical data destruction because it protects patients against novel threats to next-generation care. Without preparation, the biggest facilities in the world could lose the progress they have made in bettering global health.
By Zac Amos, ReHack
