From the hospital hallways to home-based treatment, smartphones, tablets and wearables are aiding health care practitioners in their treatment of patients by providing secure access to critical, real-time patient data in electronic medical records.

Mobile technologies are having a transformative impact on health care. They actively enable organizations to greatly increase efficiency through streamlined workflows and faster response times, the results of which equate to better patient care and patient outcomes.

Clinicians and nurses are leveraging mobile devices for more in-depth patient monitoring and management of care delivery; practitioners are more empowered than ever to communicate and coordinate care across teams; and organizations are better enabled to manage and keep track of health care resources.

The benefits are abundantly clear, and it’s the readily available, highly personal and valuable data that’s driving mobility initiatives. Unfortunately, that data is also precisely the motivating factor behind cybercriminals’ desire to attack health care organizations.

Infecting the Health Care Industry

Cybercriminals recognized the importance of obtaining health records with personally identifiable information (PII). These lucrative stolen records are highly valuable on the Dark Web, most recently selling for an average of $363 per record, the highest dollar amount per record of all industries.

In efforts to extract this sensitive information, attacks on health care data have risen over 125 percent since 2010, and 91 percent of health care organizations have admitted to experiencing at least one data breach. Each breach averaged more than $2 million in losses.

Figures like that can cause palpitations for decision-makers in health care organizations, leading to wariness when adopting mobile tech. However, there’s a solution that ensures providers are capable of utilizing mobile devices to increase productivity and efficiency — and do so with the most stringent security!

Enterprise Mobility Management: The Right Antidote

When the NIST and NCCoE established their cybersecurity guidelines around securely mobilizing electronic health records, there’s a reason they included the suggestion of utilizing an enterprise mobility management solution (EMM): There’s no better treatment for a health care organization’s mobility maladies than IBM MaaS360.

MaaS360 ensures your mobile strategy is safe, simple and compliant with HIPAA and other regulations. It also guarantees it’s providing IT with the right management capabilities for all the devices, docs and data in your mobile environment and enabling better communication and collaboration in real time.

Health care organizations can employ MaaS360 for a variety of mobile productivity and protection use cases, including:

• Over-the-air provisioning and configuration of devices for hospital use;
• Delivering apps and content to users based on worker profiles;
• Storing sensitive patient data in an encrypted workplace;
• Automating and enforcing granular compliance policies;
• Enabling corporate, personal and shared devices for staff; and
• Remotely locating and wiping lost or stolen devices.

For even stronger security, MaaS360’s Mobile Threat Management (MTM) protects organizations by proactively detecting, analyzing and remediating risks from mobile malware, suspicious configurations and sophisticated phishing attacks.

The Right Mobile Management Prescription for Health Care

For an industry in which acting quickly and correctly could mean the difference between life and death, practitioners need access to the best tools and data with the right security policies.

Discover how MaaS360 can help your organization successfully embrace mobility to increase productivity, efficiency and overall personalized treatment for patients, all while maintaining HIPAA compliance. Get started today with a free 30-day trial!