AHA issues guidelines for secure working from home

PARCA eNews – May 2, 2020 – With many physicians and healthcare providers working from home and seeing patients via telehealth platforms, the American Hospital Association (AHA) and American Medical Association (AMA) published guidelines to ensure such communications remain safe from cyber threats and comply with privacy regulations.

Noting that cyber criminals are taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to target physicians and other health providers to gain access to patient records information.

To help providers to protect their computers and home networks, the organizations compiled a checklist of actions providers should take immediately to strengthen their cybersecurity. Acknowledging the checklist is not an exhaustive list of security measures, the list covers most of the basic measures IT professionals routinely use for office and clinic networks. It covers safeguards that need to be taken for passwords, web browsers, antivirus software, updated operating systems and firewalls.

In addition, the guidance includes information on common cyber threats, such as e-mail phishing schemes, and ransomware, as well as information about using virtual private networks (VPN), multi-factor authentication. To protect against ransomware the guidance suggests:

• 3 offline segmented backup copies of data
• 2 different media types, and
• 1 cloud-based backup,

Ensure direct and remote access to the backups highly restricted and monitored

The guidance also offers tips for securing phones and tablets and maintaining cyber hygiene.

The full guidelines document is available online.

Sources: AMA & AHA joint press release and Working from Home during Covid-19 pandemic document