How Safe Data Drives a Remarkable Patient Experience

All healthcare providers want their patients to enjoy remarkable experiences, which is central to building patient trust and loyalty. This begins with using data to understand what patients want and, perhaps most crucially, how they behave. Doing so allows you to honor patients’ often unspoken preferences, which demonstrates understanding and respect. Protecting confidential data also is critically important in ensuring that the patient journey is smooth and trustworthy.

Data should play a central role, for example, as providers increasingly seek to transition patient engagement to digital channels. While digital engagement certainly offers multiple benefits, it’s important to make this transition in the right way—and at the right pace—for each patient.

Seeing how patients are engaging today is the first step in changing how they might be comfortable engaging with you in the future. With data driving the digital transition, organizations typically see an initial 35% reduction in postage costs— without incurring negative consequences with patients or their bottom line. Data also can reveal the best payment strategy for individual patients, ranging from pay-in-full, payment plans or help with financing.

Data Must be Safe to be Effective

The power of data can only be realized when it is secure.

Digital information must be protected from unauthorized access, corruption and theft throughout its entire lifecycle. Yet, serious data breaches are frequently in the news as unauthorized access to patient information through hacking or insider threats becomes more common.

Ransomware attacks involving malicious software programs that encrypt patient data and then demand a ransom to decrypt it represent another serious threat. Healthcare data is particularly vulnerable to ransomware attacks due to its critical nature and the need for providers to have immediate access to it.

These incidents have the potential to negatively impact patient care. Needless to say, healthcare organizations pay a high financial and reputational cost when data breaches occur.

A robust healthcare data protection program must go beyond mere compliance with government and industry standards. Insist that all vendors with a legitimate need to access your patient and company data demonstrate a commitment to the most stringent data security practices.

Ask for evidence that vendors will keep your data safe with various security measures including strong password policies, encryption, access controls, regular backups, firewalls, multi-faceted authentication and ongoing employee training.

These important tactics prevent unauthorized access to sensitive patient and company information. Those who follow even stricter protocols and regularly submit to optional security audits are demonstrating that they take data security as seriously as you do and your patients expect.