“True listening is hearing the needs of the customer, understanding those needs, and making sure the company recognizes the opportunities they present,” said Frank Eliason, Director of Client Experience at Citi. At Protenus, this mindset leads the way. In fact, we rely on insight from our customers, not only to improve, but to innovate. On the Customer Success team, customer feedback drives everything we do. And we start by listening.

As a Privacy Officer with more than 30 years experience working in both large and small healthcare organizations, I’ve experienced multiple privacy postures, ranging from manual reactive audits to proactive privacy monitoring that allowed us to get ahead of breaches to patient privacy before they became catastrophic for the organization or patients. After three decades of experience, I realized that there are three things that every Privacy Officer should know to ensure they are applying best practices for privacy within their organization.

When Protenus was first building its sales and marketing team, I joined as the Senior Marketing Manager. This meant shaping marketing initiatives to make Protenus more successful, and determining which priorities we should tackle first. As I was a “jack-of-all-trades,” I was working on everything from marketing strategy to trade show logistics to content that would elevate our brand within the healthcare industry.  

A recent report has stated that patient records affected by health data breaches have hit a four-year low in 2017.  Unfortunately, while these findings are promising, the number of breach incidents remains steady and continues to represent a constant threat to patient data security.  There also seems to be a continuing trend in which health data breaches that have affected the most patient records in a given month are the result of hacking while breaches that have taken the longest to detect are the result of insiders. February continues this trend, with a ransomware attack responsible for the largest single incident of the month and an insider-error incident that continued for over four years before it was detected by the healthcare organization. There was also one incident that was the result of insider-wrongdoing, and this particular case highlights just how insidious insider-wrongdoing breaches can be.

Last month, Matt Fisher, a partner at Mirick O’Connell and chair of the firm’s health law group, joined Robert Lord, Co-Founder and President of Protenus, for a webinar to discuss best practices healthcare organizations can employ when migrating from reactive to proactive privacy postures, and how to integrate guidance from regulatory bodies into these practices.

Listen to the full webinar to learn about key recommendations Robert and Matt shared when moving from a reactive to proactive privacy posture.