The use of mobile devices in health care sometimes outpaces the privacy and security protections on those devices. Stolen personal information can have negative financial impacts, but stolen medical information cuts to the very core of personal privacy. Medical identity theft already costs billions of dollars each year, and altered medical information can put a person’s health at risk through misdiagnosis, delayed treatment, or incorrect prescriptions.
Cybersecurity experts at the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) collaborated with health care industry leaders and technology vendors to develop an example solution to show health care organizations how they can secure electronic health records on mobile devices. The guide provides IT implementers and security engineers with a detailed architecture so that they can recreate the security characteristics of the example solution with the same or similar technologies. Our solution is guided by relevant standards and best practices from NIST and others, including those in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule.
Draft Cybersecurity Practice Guide, Special Publication 1800-1: Securing Electronic Health Records on Mobile Devices
Please submit comments by September 25, 2015. Comments will be made public after review and can be submitted anonymously. Submit comments online --OR-- via email to HIT_NCCoE@nist.gov.