Security Logging and Monitoring for EHRs

If you are like most medium or large healthcare providers these days, your Electronic Health Record (EHR) environment is likely a very complex one. Such complexity brings with it a fair amount of difficulty in monitoring the environments for security incidents.

Monitoring for security incidents is different from privacy monitoring

Many such healthcare providers have also likely invested in privacy monitoring solutions over the last few years. These investments have been driven largely by the HIPAA Security/Privacy rule or Meaningful Use mandates as well as the  need to be able to identify and respond effectively to privacy incidents or complaints.

Privacy monitoring use cases fall into a fairly limited set of categories – e.g. snooping of neighbor, workforce member or celebrity records. Given the nature and the somewhat narrow definition of these use cases, many organizations appear to be doing a good job in this respect. This is especially the case when organizations have implemented one of the leading privacy monitoring solutions.

While such organizations have notable success with monitoring for privacy incidents,  the same can’t be said for monitoring of security incidents. This is so despite the fact that most of these organizations have invested substantively in security – be it security monitoring solutions such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)  orservices such as third party managed security services.

Where is the problem and what might we do about it?

In our experience, the lack of effective security monitoring capabilities across EHR environments can be usually attributed to the lack of appropriate security logs to begin with. And, it is usually not a straightforward problem to solve for more than one reason. The most common reason is the complex nature of the applications and their diverse sets of components or modules. Many of the EHRs were not designed with good security monitoring, in our view.  One can also point to the rather complex and custom workflows at each organization that these EHRs support.

Solving this problem usually requires a specialist effort by personnel who have a strong background in security (and security monitoring). We also need who have specialist knowledge and experience with the respective EHR applications. After all, each EHR application is unique in how the vendors have implemented their security and security logging features.

How could we help?

We can help develop a strategy and assist with implementing a sustainable security monitoring program for your EHR(s). We have experience doing this for Epic and Cerner among others and can help you leverage your existing security/privacy monitoring technologies or managed services investments.

Please leave us a message at +1 312-544-9625 or send us a note to services@tueoris.com if you would like to discuss further.

Thank you!

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Kamal Govindaswamy

Posted on

January 05, 2017