A story we hear too often
The doctor who wanted to stop worrying about the thing he could not see
a 62-year-old internist who owns a four-provider practice
Dr. Okafor is 62. He has owned the practice on Devon Avenue for twenty-six years, four providers and eleven staff, and he still reads every lab result himself. He has started thinking about the beach. A week, the first in six years.
What keeps him from booking it is the thing he cannot see. The EHR is in the cloud, the imaging server is in the closet, the billing runs through a vendor, and a laptop with the schedule goes home with the office manager. He reads about practices that lost twenty years of records over a weekend and cannot say that his would not.
Tuesday at 6:50 a.m. the front desk opens an email from ‘the imaging vendor’ with an invoice attached. The attachment tries to run. In the version that ends badly it runs, the imaging server encrypts by noon, patients are turned away for three weeks, and OCR’s first question is where the risk analysis is.
In Dr. Okafor’s version the attachment is stopped on the front-desk PC, the engineer on watch confirms nothing spread, and the risk analysis, current as of last week, already lists the vendor and the control. He books the week in March. He tells his wife it is the first time in years he is not taking the worry with him.
The attachment tries to run.
What changes the ending
- Email and endpoint protection on every PC, including the front desk (CIS Controls 9 and 10, Email Protections and Malware Defenses)
- Offline, tested backups of the EHR extract and the imaging server (CIS Control 11, Data Recovery)
- A current risk analysis that names every system and vendor, kept true every day (CIS Controls 1, 2 and 15, and the HIPAA Security Rule)