5 Essential Tips to Maintain your Electronic Health Records (EHR) System in Nigeria

Do you remember that last shoe you cared for and maintained properly? It served you well and long, right? Imagine you also bought a laptop and didn’t take good care of it well. You probably can attest to what happened after a while. Similarly, it will be unwise to implement an EHR system in your healthcare facility, and not know what steps or tips to secure and maintain it, because it is one thing for you to implement, and it is another thing to maintain. Moreover, maintenance requires a great effort, but simple and easy steps to take if you want it to serve you well. Read on to know what these essential tips are.

5 Tips to Maintain Your EHR System

1. Regularly Execute the Risk Assessment Process

This assessment highlights certain risks to be considered when making decisions. For instance, your organisation can decide to have another branch somewhere else or maybe change EHR vendors — which all come with risks. Examples of risks they pose could be cost and interoperability. The big question now will be, “How much risk does this new decision pose to my electronic health records?”

2. Conduct Intrusion & Penetration Scans

Scanning helps to save, store, and protect critical documents. Likewise, conducting a routine scan on your EHR system helps you protect your EHR records and detect intrusions and vulnerabilities that could be exploited to gain access to your electronic patient health information (ePHI). This scan identifies loopholes such as a hole in the firewall, unpatched systems, and more. The inability to conduct this scan often paves the way for cybercriminals to access and hack important information.

If by chance you notice an intrusion, with immediacy, ensure you conduct a penetration test to remediate your findings from your vulnerability scan.

3. Encrypt Your Data

Despite proactive measures, data breaches still happen. Encryption curbs these breaches by providing adequate protection of patients’ data. Your organisation must utilise encryption across all boards — from encrypting your laptops to encrypting your emails. In addition, encryption renders your data useless by encoding it and rendering it unintelligible to whoever doesn’t have authorised access to it. By doing so, it safeguards sensitive data from being accessed by cybercriminals. In addition, your encryption should be in place both at transit and at rest.

4. Habitually Update and Patch your System

Updating your system habitually

• repairs security holes in your system;
• fixes/remove bugs;
• adds new features to your system; and
• removes unneeded features.

All of these benefits save your facility from issues that could damage your records.

Meanwhile, unpatched security holes are opportunities for cybercriminals to prey on your sensitive information. Once a vulnerability has been discovered, hackers will write a code to target and exploit the vulnerability with malicious intent. If successful, the hackers may use the security loophole to infect your computer.

Do not be surprised that hackers are often the first to discover security loopholes. But upgrades and patches are released as quickly as possible to prevent them from further exploiting the discovered vulnerability. So next time you receive the notification to update your system, do not hesitate.

5. Regularly Go Through Your Audits Logs

Regularly checking your audit logs keeps you abreast of any evolving threats. Any system that stores patients’ information should be able to produce logging details on who accessed the patient data, the accessed time and the accessed data. These logs identify that employees are only searching for the information needed to perform their job and reporting any noticed inappropriate and unauthorised access.

For example, if you go through your logs and notice that one of your staff logged in at an odd hour to view about 50 patient records, this serves as a red flag to you to act quickly.

Remember, you can render your audit logs useless by not routinely checking them. In turn, you make your EHR system prone to hackers, endangering your patient records and losing money.

6. Grow! Grow! Grow!

This is a bonus tip. A growing organisation is an ever-improving organisation.

To grow

• give room for suggestions from your staff and customers on how to deliver better and quality healthcare services;
• ensure that team members are highly skilled in the EHR system, especially when the system is updated with new improved features. It encourages active users to share their ideas and suggestions in enhancing usability. For instance, the Mediverse Ai team offers training for every staff member of the hospital who is onboarding their software.
• prepare for occasional glitches, always. To be fully prepared for these glitches, you must brainstorm on possible (technical) issues that can occur and map out solid plans to solve them.

Conclusion

As the world gets more digitalised, the presence of Electronic Health Records continuously grows, making it the perfect target for criminal activity. Therefore, healthcare facilities must take proactive measures to ensure that EHR data and systems are protected and maintained to produce maximum results. At Mediverse AI EHR, we put data safety and security first, designing and building the platform as such. To implement our EHR system in your facility, you can contact Mediverseai at +2349167544986 or esther@healthbotics.org.