What Does It Mean To Be Secure and How Does It Affect My Practice?

Today, you often hear people throw the word “security” around. It’s a word that has several different meanings, depending upon the context in which it’s used. However, when it comes to data, the term security refers to several critical aspects of your practice’s information that you will want to be very keenly aware of.

Protecting your data’s security, from an information technology standpoint, must address all of these critical areas. If it doesn’t, your data could potentially be exposed to many risks that could jeopardize your client’s confidentiality and hamper your practice’s ability to conduct business. However, doctors don’t have to become cyber-security experts to protect their patients and practices.

Industry-leading EMR provider PatientNOW, along with its cloud-services hosting partner AWS, offer doctor’s turn-key, best-in-class solutions that provide the functionality you need with the flawless security you and your patients deserve. To see how PatientNOW with AWS gives you the ultimate in data protection, let’s look at a few critical aspects of every PatientNOW cloud-based application.

Maintaining Your Data’s Integrity

There are two primary forms of data integrity. The first is ensuring that the data you enter into your PatientNOW EMR is accurate, is unaffected by unexpected or unwanted changes and is carefully preserved for when you need it in the future. Your PatientNOW EMR satisfies all these requirements through user authentication, which you are already very familiar with, and data-validation tools, which operate at every stage of your interaction with your PatientNOW EMR.

You also want to be sure that your data is kept entirely separate from that of other competing practices. This eliminates the possibility of inadvertent data breaches or cross-contamination of your data with information from other sources. Every PatientNOW EMR powered by AWS accomplishes this goal by keeping your data physically separated from all other clients.

This physical separation includes separate databases — so only your data resides on your databases — and also network separation or “air-gapping.” Air-gapped servers make the connection between your computers and those from another practice physically impossible. Additionally, when PatientNOW transfers your data from production servers to your host servers, we use state-of-the-art, high-strength encryption to safeguard your data upon loading, giving you complete assurance from the earliest stages.

Keeping Your Data Secure from Intrusion

Once PatientNOW has set-up your dedicated EMR hosting servers, PatientNOW then takes the next crucial step required to protect your data — preventing data corruption or theft from unauthorized outside intrusion. The first way PatientNOW helps stop unwanted intrusions is through server architecture. Your dedicated server pod, called an “instance,” never includes web servers; this eliminates a major entry point used by hackers to get unwanted access to your data.

Additionally, client consoles — the software on devices you and your staff use to connect to your EMR — never have “root access” privileges; this prevents malicious users from uploading malware (harmful software) that could corrupt or co-opt your data. However, hacking technology evolves quickly. For this reason, your cloud-based EMR has another essential feature to render malware inoperable and preserve your data, guaranteeing your practice stays up and running.

Preserving Your Data Through Continual Back-ups

Ransomware allows hackers to take your data hostage, effectively putting a halt to your regular business operations until they get what they want. But what if you always have your data available to you, safe and intact, in the event of such an attack? Continual back-ups prepare clients for just this possibility, by making live, active data quickly retrievable and subverting unauthorized attempts such as these. With live backups, clients can continue serving their customers without disruption.

PatientNOW cloud-based EMRs with AWS support offer you precisely this guarantee. Routine backups keep data from the present up to 30-days old on-hand and readily available, reducing your practice’s threat from ransomware while also protecting one of your practice’s most valuable assets, your patient information. Automated data retention also insulates your practice from the risk, although small, of hardware failure. But PatientNOW with AWS protects your practice in even more ways.

With a PatientNOW cloud-backed EMR, you can count on “the cloud,” itself, being secure, too

When you select PatientNOW as your EMR and cloud-hosting partner, you will never have to worry about problems with your computer systems. Ever. This is because PatientNOW and AWS strictly follow a Shared Responsibility Model to protect your infrastructure. In an SRM, AWS takes total ownership of ensuring your hardware systems are always up and running at optimum efficiency; this includes your operating servers, electronic-storage units, networking capabilities and all monitoring software. PatientNOW takes care of all the rest, including your EMR applications, user authentication, encryption, firewalls and backups. Every aspect of your hardware and software instance has the full protection of PatientNOW and AWS so you can continue to focus on your patients, using the tools you have come to rely on, completely worry-free.

PatientNOW Cloud Solutions Featuring AWS Support Protect Your Data From Every Angle

Storing one of your most valuable assets, your data, in the cloud can be unsettling for some doctors. It can feel like their practice information is out of their hands and out of their control. It can seem like the precise opposite of what common sense would dictate — keeping your data at your practice where you can guard it, directly, yourself.

However, unless you have the resources to invest in a full-time IT person — and all the hardware and software infrastructure you will need in addition — your data still won’t have the full protection it can. Cloud-hosting your PatientNOW EMR with AWS, on the other hand, gives you access to world-class technology and experts in every infrastructure subspecialty for total peace of mind, 24/7.

Still need more information? Call one of our friendly cloud-support specialists at 800-436-3150 to get your questions answered today. We can give you additional, detailed information about each stage of the process and help you get started with industry-leading data protection that doesn’t get in the way of your Number One priority — giving your patients the healthy outcomes they deserve.