We live in a technology-driven world where every day more and more processes are becoming digitized, which is causing privacy to be a major issue for various businesses, including dental offices. Patients put their complete trust in their dentists when they provide them with their personal information, and the costs involved with losing or exposing that sensitive information could potentially ruin a dental practice. This is exactly why the top two things on a dentist’s mind are providing quality patient care and protecting patient privacy.
Enter, the cloud.
A cloud-based dental practice management solution is how dental offices can best protect their practice and their patient data. Security is a serious matter in the dental industry, and while some may be skeptical of using the cloud, a cloud-based solution actually improves the security of patient’s protected health information.
How, you might ask? Below are the 7 ways the cloud better protects patient data.
1. Using state-of-the-art technology.
The Internet’s reputation for protecting people’s privacy isn’t the greatest thanks to a few website security breaches that have been highly exposed over the years. But that shouldn’t sway a dental office from thinking they can’t put their trust in the cloud. A cloud-based solution delivers more advanced, enterprise-level security abilities than any on-site practice management software. By accessing environments capable of providing the highest expertise and security technology levels, this advanced technology safeguards offices, their patients and all their data.
2. Providing a full-time security team.
Dental practices have several full-time employees, but these employees can’t work 24/7. They put in 40 or so hours a week, but they also use vacation and sick days. The one team member that won’t take any days off, including nights and weekends, is an office’s cloud-based dental management software. It works around the clock ensuring every patient electronic record is safely stored in a high-quality data center. These sophisticated data facilities have the most high-level protection measures in place to keep patient data secure every minute of every day.
3. Offering immediate, automatic data backups.
According to studies, up to 40-60% of backups aren’t conducted properly — the end result being unrecoverable data. Practices that rely on manual backup processes face numerous potential failures, like forgetting to perform a scheduled backup or dealing with high breakdown rates due to bad media quality. Performing manual backups is severely time consuming, and when a committed IT department isn’t in place, the responsibility falls into the hands of an office manager or dentist, who has neither the time nor skillset to accurately complete these backups. Using the cloud means receiving automatic data backups. These backups are done regularly and immediately, so information is always up-to-date and complete. Even if a computer crashes, the latest information has been backed up so the information is recoverable by simply using another device.
4. Issuing automatic software updates.
Doing manual software updates are just as frustrating and time consuming as performing manual backups. They’re also easy to forget to do if a notification is given to do one right in the middle of a busy workday. But this isn’t even an issue with cloud-based software. The software updates are done automatically. This automation prevents productivity losses and downtime — which equals lost revenue — for an entire practice because it minimizes the risks of virus and malware threats by using the latest anti-malware technology to protect all office devices.
5. Lowering the risk of online hackers.
The risk of online hackers always lingers in people’s heads when they store their information in the cloud. But a recent study stated that most security breaches are due to theft of hard drives and paper records. Only 6% of incidents involved hacking. When an office uses a cloud-based service, their risk of online hackers decreases even more because their data is in the secure hands of topnotch security professionals trained to design the most advanced protections that keep hackers at bay. Small and large dental offices just don’t have the knowledge or available resources to maintain that kind of preemptive observation of their patient data.
6. Turning catastrophes into small inconveniences.
Computers and mobile devices are great, but they aren’t 100% reliable. Something is always going to break down causing them not work, and that something can sometimes be at the fault of an employee who accidentally spills their morning coffee on a keyboard. These types of breakdowns could wreak major havoc in an office, but they don’t when an office is using cloud-based software. Data is stored in an offsite data center, which makes the data easily and immediately accessible simply by logging in from another device. What could be major catastrophes are nothing more than minor inconveniences.
7. Meeting the HIPAA privacy requirements.
Practices not only have to convince their patients their data is secure, they also must convince the government by meeting specific HIPAA privacy regulations. Violating these requirements results in severe fines and penalties. A traditional practice management system requires dental practices to meet, monitor and be responsible for all these requirements, which can be up to 19, a stressful and costly responsibility. On the other hand, a cloud-based solution already has the security measures in place that keep practices compliant with the HIPAA patient privacy requirements.
It’s clear that the only way for dental practices to stay up with the technology times and keep themselves and their patient data protected is by using the cloud.
This article was co-authored with Trevor James, who is the marketing manager for Dentrix Ascend, a cloud based dental practice management software.
Comments