The data you hold about your patients is a valuable business asset. It is essential to the day to day running of your clinic, and can be the key to growth and success.
The security of your patient data must be a priority within your clinic. It needs to be protected from unauthorised access to prevent it being tampered with, destroyed or shared with others. As well as making good business sense, you have a legal obligation under GDPR and other legislation to keep confidential patient information safe.
Data security can be breached in several ways: system failure, theft, inappropriate usage, unauthorised access or computer viruses. The effects of a data security breach can be catastrophic, in terms of interruption to operation of your business, damage to your reputation, and punishment under the law.
There are many things to consider when implementing a data security policy, including education of staff and effective software and hardware solutions. No single method on its own can completely ensure data security, but we are confident that e-clinic is a powerful tool for clinics of all sizes.
In asking a third party like e-clinic to take care of your patient data, you entrust them with a great responsibility. As a longstanding provider of cloud-hosted clinic management software, we take that responsibility seriously.
e-clinic has the highest security rating of any healthcare software provider. We use two data centres, both in the UK. They are ISO 27001 certified and Tier 3 secured, which means your data is protected by exceptional levels of both physical and virtual security at all times.
Data is securely replicated and backed up every 15 minutes from one data centre to the other. This means that if a disaster happened at one data centre, an up-to-date copy of your patient data would remain accessible at the second data centre. This eliminates any concern that you might lose access to your patients’ information in the event of a catastrophe. Server uptime is monitored 24/7 and data is encrypted at 256 bit AES (which is double the encryption rate of most connections).
Providing data security at this level is expensive, but we believe it’s a non-negotiable part of the package for any company which offers cloud-hosted software services. Are you confident that your software provider offers the same levels of security? If you using a package which is not cloud-hosted, are you confident your data is completely safe from the risk of theft, tampering or system failure? If you want to find out more about e-clinic and our secure, cloud-hosted software, please get in touch.
in our next blog post, we’ll look at how you can keep your personal data safe as an individual.
