The State of Identity Security in Healthcare: Emphasizing Cybersecurity Amid the Digital Shift

In recent years, the healthcare industry has experienced an unprecedented digital shift driven by technology innovations, remote work, and telehealth culture, and in turn increased cyber threats.

The shift to online health services has required healthcare providers to upscale their digital backend systems and prioritise identity security strategies — with a heightened focus on compliance and cybersecurity requirements — especially considering healthcare is the top industry for cyber breaches in Australia, according to the OAIC.

In fact, SailPoint’s 2023 Identity Security in Healthcare Report shows 93% of organisations experienced a breach in the last two years, with operational downtime being the most common impact at 43%. Nearly all respondents (97%) agreed their organisation’s ability to manage access to sensitive data needs improvement, despite having specific measures in place already, such as data encryption.

According to the OAIC 2022 Data Breach Report, 59% of all cyber incidents recorded are due to compromised or stolen credentials — yet the same percentage of all respondents from the 2022 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report didn’t have a zero trust approach in place.

High Costs of Inadequate Cybersecurity Measures

A data breach causes almost an instant reduction in share price by 5% for publicly listed Australian companies, with loss of business, customers and reputational damage amongst other costs associated with managing a breach, per a Ponemon Institute study.

Recent events serve as potent reminders of the very real risks cyberattacks pose to the healthcare sector. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) mandated a large health insurance provider to set aside $250 million as insurance against issues linked to a serious breach, emphasising the high costs associated with inadequate cybersecurity measures.

These challenges are echoed by Amanda Cattermole, CEO of the Australian Digital Health Agency, who recently joined me on a podcast. She stated, “A recent OAIC study shows that 70% of Australians still see privacy as a major concern. Cyberattack horror stories or data breach headlines in the news do not help this perception. If we want to build on the trust factor or assurance factor, we simply need to try to reduce the data breaches by preventing internal access from falling in the wrong hands.”

To prevent bad actors from gaining and elevating their access rights whilst going unnoticed within the network, the industry needs to implement a user-centric approach by placing a ‘firewall’ around each individual.

The Key to Mitigating Digital Risks

The ability to proactively mitigate escalating digital risks is critical. It’s key to implement a robust identity security strategy to reduce risk by monitoring access privileges and providing users with only the necessary access, simplify complex compliance requirements, and enhance the security and efficiency of operations.

Healthcare identity management is no small feat. It involves securing individuals with one-to-many roles, derived from multiple authoritative sources, and spanning complex user populations. Manual processes simply cannot meet the scale and complexity of these challenges. That’s where AI-driven identity security comes in.

With AI-driven, SaaS based identity security, healthcare organisations get continuous, 360-degree visibility into all user types and their related access across all connected systems, allowing controls to be put in place to govern all SaaS access, and to spot and defend against threats in real-time. This, in turn, enables healthcare organisations to accelerate digital transformation, and confidently manage and integrate all digital identities, assigned entitlements, and applications, creating a holistic identity security ecosystem.

Looking ahead, the rapid digitisation of healthcare calls for an identity security strategy that is advanced, agile, and comprehensive. As the threat landscape continues to evolve, identity security must be at the core of safeguarding data, networks, and patient privacy.

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