Medical Practice IT Costs and Benchmarks

Medical institutions deal with life-threatening issues, so it’s imperative that their IT systems suffer no downtime, cybersecurity events, or hardware malfunctions. IoT is also common in healthcare. The machines that diagnose and treat patients need internet connectivity for many of their operations. IT support and maintenance are priority for hospitals, so their IT costs are high compared to businesses that can absorb issues without human casualties.

Even though IT costs shouldn’t be the main priority, it doesn’t mean that you can’t manage them without affecting the resiliency of your digital infrastructure. According to the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), medical businesses can expect to spend 2-3% of their revenue on technology and IT expenses. Many of the resources you’ll need to support your IT infrastructure is cybersecurity. For example, you need monitoring, disaster recovery, VPN, and staff training to stay HIPAA compliant.

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For medical practices, you might need a rundown on where IT costs should be prioritized. We put together a small list of critical infrastructure medical practices need to stay scalable while protecting patient data. 

Virtual Private Network (VPN) for Remote Access

After COVID, many businesses adopted the practice of remote work. Of course, a medical business also has local staff always on-premises, but you might have contractors, customer service, and emergency medical personnel available remotely. These staff members need a way to remotely access patient data and business applications. To safely remote into any system containing medical data, you need a VPN.

A VPN encrypts all data traveling from a user’s device to the internal network, and then from the internal network back to the user’s device. This functionality is especially important when a remote worker connects to the local environment from public Wi-Fi. For instance, a doctor might be at a conference in a hotel but remote into the business office. Public Wi-Fi is a perfect attack environment for eavesdroppers. With VPN, the doctor’s device communication would be safe from eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. 

VPN is also a requirement for HIPAA compliance. Any IT people remoting into the network from their homes or remote connections to data center servers must be protected from eavesdropping. A VPN protects the server environment from outside attackers. Any connection from a remote device to the internal network should be encrypted using VPN.

Disaster Recovery and Backups

Patient data is a vital component of a successful medical business, so disaster recovery is critical for your business continuity. Imagine if you lost patient data and had no way to recover it. Lost data could be life-threatening, so you need a way to restore it from backups. Backups are just one part of disaster recovery, but they are also important in HIPAA compliance.

A disaster recovery plan details the steps, procedures, and recovery options during a critical outage. For example, if your network suffers from a ransomware attack, disaster recovery goes into effect. You might need to switch to pen-and-paper registration and patient management, but you will eventually recover your data.

Using the ransomware attack example, a disaster recovery plan identifies stakeholders and alerts them during downtime. Professionals detect, contain, and eradicate the threat from your environment, and then they collect evidence for local law enforcement. Disaster recovery professionals might be an extra cost unless you have a managed service provider managing your IT infrastructure.

Backups provide a solution for data recovery. It’s usually the last step in disaster recovery after a threat is eradicated from the environment. Backups must happen frequently, and they must be stored in a safe location away from threats. Usually, businesses keep backups in the cloud to keep them out of the read of ransomware and other threats. For example, ransomware will specifically target backups to leverage data theft over the targeted business. Without valid backups, businesses are forced to pay the ransom.

Network Monitoring

You need to know when a compromise happens to contain a threat immediately. Constant monitoring is necessary for HIPAA and the safety of your patients. Intrusion detection and prevention require specific infrastructure, so you might need help with the setup from professionals experienced with deployment and configuration. One wrong configuration could mean a compromise of your data, so it must be done right.

As an example, suppose that a ransomware threat is introduced to your environment from a phishing email. A user downloads a script from the email that then installs the ransomware on the network. Intrusion detection and prevention immediately contains the threat to limit its damage to your environment. 

Immediate containment gives your incident response team the ability to perform forensics and understand where cybersecurity infrastructure failed. It could have been a failure from lack of education, or your email filtering software returned a false negative. Containment is key to investigation without harming the medical business environment.

Where to Get Help with IT Costs

IT infrastructure has its own costs, but managing it is much more costly. You need help for your medical practice, and a managed service provider is a good first step. Professionals at a managed service provider lower costs of having onsite staff, and they can deploy the right infrastructure to protect your environment. Whether it’s cybersecurity infrastructure or expanding the network to support additional patients, a managed service provider ensures that your buildout is configured right.

If you need to set up your medical practice infrastructure, contact us to see how Corporate Technologies can help.

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