Overcoming Healthcare’s catch-22: How to ditch these five risky habits

Security. Efficiency. Do you ever feel like you have to pick one or the other? Healthcare professionals walk this difficult tightrope every day. On the one hand, you need to share information as quickly and seamlessly as possible. (Lives are at stake! Patients are tired of waiting!) And on the other hand, there’s a burning need to protect sensitive health data, lest it fall into the wrong hands.

This rock-and-a-hard-place situation often leads to unsafe workforce behavior. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

• Your employees share credentials such as log-ins and passwords with each other so they can help with time-consuming administrative tasks.
• You leave a post-it note with a common password on a shared desk (the department “cheat sheet”).
• Employees often stay logged into an application or device to save time.
• Your doctors keep written notes on patients with the intent to “enter it all later.”(Maybe because your network is slow and the EHR lags?)
• You text information or instructions to other employees on cell phones that might not be secure—or perhaps you leave the phone in full view of patients.

In the back of your mind, you know that these habits can lead to data breaches or worse. But you haven’t been hacked or fined yet, so you cross your fingers and plow ahead, getting important things done. And you’re not alone. A survey found that 41% of healthcare organizations have sacrificed security in the name of productivity—a number much higher than in other industries (32%).

There must be a better way, right? Shouldn’t it be possible to work efficiently AND securely at the same time?

Yes. And it is.

Secure collaboration technology—combined with some employee training—can help get you there.

Check out the infographic below to see a day in the life of a healthcare facility with and without the technology to collaborate both quickly and securely—and see where you stand compared to other healthcare providers.

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