How Future Healthcare Technology Is Elevating At-Home Care Through Better Endpoint Security

Mobile healthcare technology advances have made it safer and easier than ever for patients to receive their care in the comfort of their own homes. As these services continue to expand, home care workers increasingly rely on mobile medical technologies, such as laptops and tablets, to access and update electronic health records, communicate with colleagues, and more.

One of the greatest challenges of in-home care is that providers must follow the same rules they would in a medical facility. Traveling doctors, nurses, and healthcare aides must provide high-quality care in a range of settings while remaining compliant with HIPAA and other healthcare regulations. To maintain this level of care, home healthcare needs technology with layered endpoint security, whether in the clinic or in a patient’s home where connectivity may not be available.

Home Healthcare Technology Operates in Uncontrolled Environments

Care workers go where the patient needs them. When connectivity gaps are a constant risk, secure remote access to offline documentation is a must-have. If care stops whenever the network disappears, that becomes more than a technical issue. It impacts the healthcare professional's ability to provide effective, timely care.

In addition to the actual patient environments, home healthcare workers themselves are highly mobile, often working from their car or moving between patient locations with laptops or tablets in tow. Many of these healthcare professionals end up using their own personal laptops, tablets, or mobile devices, which were not built for the reality of the work, nor are they protected by the enterprise security technologies that an in-office or company-issued device might have.

Given the inherent nature of mobile healthcare work, mobile healthcare technology must also withstand rough handling, spills, drops, bad weather, frequent disinfection, and more; and, given the decentralized nature of the job, there is no IT team down the hall when a device breaks.

Endpoint Security Gaps Get Bigger When Healthcare Technology Goes Remote

The U.S. healthcare system’s IT security infrastructure is not built with mobile care in mind. Most healthcare organizations still rely on a castle-and-moat model, which assumes that all devices on the network are protected safely behind the four walls of a facility rather than moving about freely in the wider world. Traditional endpoint security models rely on this assumption of continuous network connections and the visibility that comes with them.

But care workers can move between dozens of locations each month. When their devices are off the network, there are many risks that traditional enterprise security solutions cannot protect against. For example, without a network connection, devices may:

• Miss critical security and software updates.
• Lose real-time cybersecurity threat monitoring from the cloud.
• Be physically tampered with by unauthorized users.
• Get stolen or lost.

These risks apply to virtually every industry that relies on a distributed workforce, but they are especially pronounced in the healthcare sector, where exposing confidential patient information can result in costly HIPAA violations.

Even if devices do have offline protection installed to mitigate risk, these tools typically operate at the operating system or application level. Unfortunately, not all threats exist in this area. Bad actors are increasingly targeting device firmware and BIOS, which remain largely unprotected by OS-level solutions.

When security depends on network connectivity, home healthcare operations are at much higher risk of cybersecurity incidents. Healthcare organizations must take a layered approach to cybersecurity to identify and mitigate threats wherever they may occur.

Layered Security from TOUGHBOOK Total Defense

To ensure regulatory compliance and data privacy on the road and in every patient’s home, home healthcare technology needs protection built into each device. Panasonic TOUGHBOOK® Total Defense is purpose-built to provide this level of end-to-end protection, from the BIOS to the cloud.

While some IT departments attempt to build layered protection through individual point systems, the Total Defense security stack is designed to provide comprehensive coverage in one package. To break it down, Total Defense includes:

• TOUGHBOOK Guard: Ensures the integrity of your hardware by detecting changes at the BIOS level before the operating system fully boots up.
• Smart Compliance: Validates the integrity of firmware, flags potential threats, and provides the data needed to streamline compliance.
• SentinelOne: Not only monitors at the operating level for malicious behavior, ransomware and other malware, unauthorized changes to the device, and exploits, but can also roll back cyberattacks even when the device is not connected to a network.
• Absolute: Embedded directly into the BIOS of every TOUGHBOOK to reinstall itself and other trusted applications if they are altered or removed.

Total Defense eases the cybersecurity burden on healthcare IT teams by ensuring protection even in field-based care settings. Devices are not only better protected, but IT gains more visibility into endpoints that are not always connected to the main network. Meanwhile, healthcare workers can safely transmit patient data and review records and documentation without worrying about whether they missed a security update or inadvertently caused a compliance violation.

Better yet, all of this is built into semi-rugged and fully rugged laptops and 2-in-1 tablets, which can handle the rigors of healthcare, even in the most unpredictable patient homes.

For healthcare organizations that are building, operating, or expanding a home healthcare service, endpoint security cannot be an afterthought. It should be a core consideration when deploying mobile healthcare technology. With TOUGHBOOK rugged laptops and tablets and Total Defense, care teams have the tools they need to deliver safe and secure care beyond the four walls of the hospital.

Learn more about TOUGHBOOK solutions for healthcare.