Every dental practice wants to keep their patients’ Personal Health Information (PHI) safe and secure. Creating solid dental cyber security is important for any dental practice, of any size. In this blog, we’ll discuss how you can set goals to bring everyone on your team into alignment on cyber security.
First, there are two key things you will need to know:
Understanding KPIs
A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a number that shows how well a person, team, or business is doing in reaching important goals. For dental professionals, KPIs can help track how well your practice is running, such as recall success rates, confirmation rates, and more. Tracking the progression of KPIs helps you understand how well things are going so you can decide if you need to make any changes to help you meet your targets. KPIs are usually tied to your main goals as a dental practice, such as strong patient engagement and successful appointment outcomes.
KPIs are a type of success metric. An example of the common uses of success metrics can be found in our recent blog.
Dental Cyber Security Basics
First of all, what is cyber security? It’s the protection of computer software, including its systems and networks, from outside threats. Such threats usually include some sort of unauthorized access to information, for example, theft of hardware, software, or data. Cyber security must also protect from the disruption and misdirection of any services that this software, system, or network provides.
Cybersecurity in dental practices is very important because it protects patient information, like health records and personal data, from online threats such as hacking, malware, and data breaches. To keep this information safe, dental practices should use encryption, secure storage, and access controls. They also need to follow specific legislation, like HIPAA in the United States and PIPEDA in Canada, that set standards for protecting patient data.
A few tips practices should keep in mind are:
- Regularly updating software, systems, and antivirus programs helps protect against weaknesses
- Training employees to recognize phishing emails and use strong passwords
- Regularly backing up data and having a recovery plan in place ensures that there’s a way to recover information if something goes wrong.
These steps help keep patients’ trust and protect the dental practice from legal and financial hardship.
Linking Dental Cyber Security and KPIs
Now that you understand KPIs and the basics of cybersecurity, let’s pull them together to see how setting goals can help your practice become more secure. Recently, Group Dentistry Now published a helpful article on how to leverage KPIs to improve cyber security at DSOs. This article addresses some of the cyber attacks that have occurred already in 2024, as well as strategies to help prevent them. Some of the KPIs they recommend for DSOs include tracking the results of simulated phishing attempts, calculating a cyber risk score, and more.
This is a very helpful exercise for DSOs and solo practices alike. KPIs can be helpful no matter what goals your team wants to set, but using them to hone in on bettering your practice’s cyber security makes a lot of sense!
Let’s explore how a solo practice would scale setting goals to tighten cyber security with their staff.
What It Could Look Like for Your Practice
For smaller practices, choosing KPIs that work for the size of your team is important. The good news: with a smaller team, it’s that much easier to bring everyone up to speed on good dental cyber security measures.
Here is an example of what KPIs for dental cyber security could look like for a solo practice:
- KPI: Have all staff complete security training. Choose a short time frame, like 1-2 months, and within that time, compléte security training with the whole team. This ensures that everyone is on the same page, with the same level of knowledge.
- KPI: Select a vulnerability scanning tool. Set a goal to choose a vulnerability scanning tool to help discover weaknesses in any of your computer or network systems.
- KPI: Track intrusion attempts. Get a clear picture of intrusion attempts by keeping a count of attempted breaches, as well as analyzing their frequency and identifying their sources.
Once you have chosen KPIs that work for your practice, you can start measuring your success. Having trackable goals will empower your team to create strong cyber security at your practice.
Resources from Intiveo
Intiveo offers several resources to support dental and oral surgery practices as they engage their patients including guides, self-assessment calculators, template packages, and more. You can also tune into our podcast, The Patient Experience Blueprint.
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