The healthcare industry is no stranger to adopting new technologies to improve patient care. While most think of physical equipment, like MRI and X-ray machines, there is another piece of the puzzle that has played a critical role in today’s changing healthcare landscape – telemedicine. This practice has become more commonplace as new healthcare concerns arise and patients are unable to get in-person medical advice. As modern healthcare-related priorities continue to shift, telemedicine must be able to rise to the occasion, both for the sake of the public and medical professionals.
Securing Telemedicine with the Right Tools and Solutions
As the public health landscape shifts and the remote workforce becomes more prevalent, healthcare organizations must actively work to ensure their employees can maintain the safety of telemedicine. In addition to those tools that are designed to secure distributed networks without compromising performance, such as Secure SD-WAN solutions, healthcare IT teams should consider the following as they expand on their telemedicine initiatives:
- An endpoint solution that provides integrated visibility, control, and proactive defense while providing secure remote access with a built-in VPN. This should be coupled with an endpoint manage system to enable scalable and centralized management of multiple endpoints.
- Identity and access management (IAM) products that are designed to confirm users’ identities and devices as they enter a network via certificate management, multifactor authentication, and single sign-on services.
- Wireless management solutions that feature pre-configured access points for secure connectivity between a remote location and an organization’s networks. Additionally, healthcare IT teams should also consider combining their wireless access point with a next-generation firewall to maximize security while meeting performance requirements.
- A telephony solution that features integrated security controls designed to protect phone conversations between patients and doctors as well as business data. This technology should be able to keep up with the high volume of traffic that telemedicine initiatives will inevitably bring about, both in terms of security and performance.
- A network authentication solution that enables remote workers to access their organization’s networks at scale. Similar to IAM products, this solution should support certificate management and single sign-on services.
- A next-generation firewall solution that consolidates various security capabilities, such as automated threat protection and SSL inspection, while reducing complexity and meeting performance needs.
The introduction of new technologies into healthcare networks has done wonders for patient care, especially in recent times. Through telemedicine, doctors can continue to help even those patients that cannot make it to a care center for any number of reasons. As these initiatives continue to grow and become more important than ever, IT teams must not only be aware of the risks facing telemedicine but should also implement the right solutions to secure connections and patient care.
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