Diligence is essential for the industry to protect itself and its patients. The right insurance coverage in the right amounts is a start. And putting best practices in place to manage the risks is absolutely critical.
Healthcare providers need to be sure of the adequacy of their cyber insurance against costly breaches. This is best done in consultation with a qualified broker to quantify the organization’s risk and coverage in appropriate dollar amounts against escalating extortion demands. During the current hard insurance market in nearly every coverage line, expect cyber insurance premiums to cost 20% to 30% more than a year ago .
Equally important is the risk mitigation programs in place. They show how seriously cyber risk is taken and are a guide insurers use to set premiums. These programs should span everything from leadership involvement and employee engagement to security protocols. The strongest programs include such measures as:
• Ongoing staff education and training on digital safety, with an emphasis on recognizing and avoiding the schemes that can compromise a network.
• Firewalls and antivirus software and other basic protections in place and regular backups of the system.
• Investment into more advanced security measures – think dual authentication, encryption and virtual private networks – is worth it.
• So are routine network audits by outside digital security experts to identify potential weaknesses.
Brokers also can check vendor contracts for potential contractual issues. Since many digital breaches occur via their systems, the adequacy of their cyber security should be checked, and indemnification handled.
Risk of misdiagnosis also heightens with virtual health No less worrisome than cybersecurity is the risk of misdiagnosis. Quality control can also be problematic – think sloppy practices where simple, relevant questions aren’t asked so important diagnoses can be missed.
Professional liability risks are a fact of life for medical professionals, but they have grown along with the expansion of virtual health. Not all conditions present in a way that can be visible to the practitioner in a video feed. Heart disease, for example, is often accompanied by fluid buildup. It may or may not be apparent in a virtual exam. A skin growth may not look like a melanoma through the camera lens, but what if a malfunction results in a faulty image?
Those failures to ask the right questions of patients during virtual consults are another liability opening. A 2016 study of telehealth practices , for example, found that no consulting clinician asked a patient with inflammatory acne about irregular periods or visible facial hair, leaving her polycystic ovarian syndrome unaddressed. Such issues would only be heightened today with the greater deployment levels.
