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January 29, 2025 | Reading time 12 minutes

Effective Strategies for Data Backup and Recovery in Healthcare

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Product Manager

Data Backup and Recovery for Healthcare Summary

The healthcare sector faces significant challenges due to data breaches, underscoring the importance of robust data management and recovery solutions. Effective strategies can mitigate risks, maintain compliance, and ensure continuity of critical services.

Healthcare Data Management Takeaways

  • Impact of Poor Data Management: Breaches disrupt services, delay insurance claims, and risk lives. Organizations face fines under regulatory frameworks like HIPAA.
  • Benefits of Robust Backup Solutions:
    • Safeguard against data loss from cyberattacks, human error, or disasters.
    • Ensure business continuity during operational disruptions.
    • Maintain compliance with legal standards to avoid penalties.
    • Preserve customer trust and organizational reputation.
  • Risks to Healthcare Data:
    • Cyberattacks are increasingly sophisticated, targeting sensitive patient data.
    • Human errors, such as accidental deletions, constitute a major breach cause.
  • Data Recovery Methods:
    • On-site Backup: Offers offline protection but involves high costs and manual efforts.
    • Cloud Backup (e.g., Spin.AI): Provides secure, scalable, and automated solutions.
    • Hybrid Approaches: Combines cloud and on-site methods for flexibility.

2024 witnessed some of the largest data breaches and subsequent operational disruptions in the history of the healthcare sector. However, it was one breach alone that ended up affecting over 100 million people. Change Healthcare, a healthcare technology company part of the UnitedHealth Group discovered a data breach in February that caused countrywide data outages in the States. Optimistic estimates from the company suggested a financial impact of more than $2.457 billion through December 31, 2024, with the number expected to climb higher. Data outages and service disruptions left many healthcare organizations in the country stranded, forcing them to lose millions in revenue. This incident forced healthcare providers and associated third parties to raise a critical question – What are the risks associated with poor data management in healthcare, and how can these risks be mitigated in the future? Unsurprisingly, the answer, as many have come to realize, lies in improving cybersecurity posture, implementing better data access safeguards, and, most importantly, investing in healthcare data protection and recovery solutions.

Importance of Data Management in Healthcare

As the Change Healthcare incident clearly demonstrates, data breaches in healthcare can affect millions of patients, disrupt medical services, delay insurance claims, and jeopardize people’s lives. Data suggests that the healthcare industry is amongst the worst affected, experiencing the highest number of breaches and the most significant associated costs.

Healthcare data primarily consists of PII, insurance details, financial information, and medical histories. Its sensitivity makes it a prominent target among nefarious cyber attackers. Moreover, the loss of brand value and erosion of public trust only compound the mounting losses for affected organizations.

Lastly, poor data management could put organizations directly in the line of fire of the HIPAA regulatory framework and enforcement agencies. Providers who run afoul risk losing millions in fines and stalled services.

With the right data management plan that includes regular secure third-party data backups, organizations can maintain compliance as well as avoid the ugly fallout of cyberattacks by quickly restoring data and ensuing services.

Benefits of Robust Backup Solutions

Backing up data to the cloud is one of the most effective data recovery solutions in healthcare. It helps minimize downtime during disruptions, maintain business continuity, ensure compliance, maintain data integrity, and cut down the steep costs of data loss during unforeseen events. Here are a few reasons why healthcare organizations must invest in robust data backup solutions and keep irreversible data loss at bay:

  1. Safeguarding against data loss

Data loss doesn’t always arise just from malicious hackers; it can also be attributed to human error, hardware failure, power outages, and natural disasters. In each case, losing access to healthcare data can bring critical services to a standstill. Proactively backing up data can help control the fallout should any data loss occur.

  1. Ensuring business continuity

The Change Healthcare data breach caused losses worth billions of dollars due to operational disruptions for healthcare providers nationwide. In fact, businesses continued to suffer through outages several months after the breach was discovered. Several practitioners even claimed to have been pushed to bankruptcy. This just goes to show that without reliable data backup and recovery through a trustworthy third-party provider, healthcare organizations cannot guarantee business continuity.

  1. Maintaining compliance standards

The HIPAA regulatory framework, or even the GDPR in the EU, was designed to improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery, protect patient privacy, and prevent sensitive data from falling into the wrong hands. Regulatory bodies can impose massive fines on healthcare organisations that fail to safeguard patient data. Advocate Healthcare was fined $5.55 million following 2 data breaches it failed to contain. Investing in effective data recovery solutions for healthcare can keep organisations on the right side of compliance.

  1. Conserving customer trust and brand reputation

Brand equity might be the most important intangible competitive advantage for healthcare organisations. Ruptured trust due to data breaches, service disruptions, and delays in claim settlements can severely erode public faith. On the other hand, investing in a robust data backup solution displays the organisation’s commitment to safeguarding patient information helping build trust.

Risks to Healthcare Data

According to Aon, data breaches have become the single biggest threat to healthcare organizations due to their unique cyber risk profiles. Healthcare organizations typically work with extensive sets of personally identifiable health information while relying heavily on outsourced service providers, increasing their exposure risk. While they are expected to make incremental gains from their investments in digitization and innovation over the years, they are also increasing their cyberattack surface area.

Cyberattacks 

According to HIPAA, more than 150 million individuals, or over a third of the US population, were affected by cyberattacks in the healthcare industry. Attacks ranged from ransomware and malware to phishing and insider threats. What was common across all types of attacks was the unprecedented loss of critical data. According to estimates, 2024 was by far the worst year for healthcare data breaches. As digital complexities increase and dependence on shared networks increases, healthcare organizations will only increase their potential risk exposure to even more calibrated threats. 

Human error 

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, 43% of all data breaches in the healthcare industry could be chalked up to inadvertent human errors. In fact, another study published by the NIH posits that the mean number of records affected by unintentional insider threats is more than twice that of breaches caused by malefactors. Data overwrites, accidental deletions and susceptibility to social engineering make humans the weakest links in the security posture of any healthcare organization. 

Evolution of Data Backup and Recovery Methodologies

Now that we’ve discussed the threats associated with poor data management practices let’s examine the three types of data backup and recovery solutions prevalent in the healthcare industry.

On-site backup

On-site backup refers to the practice of storing copies of critical data sets in physical locations. Larger enterprises can even set up their own data centres on their campuses, while smaller firms use shared and managed data centres for on-site backup and storage.

While offline on-site data backup offers an added layer of protection from digital threats, the high upfront costs and manual dependencies make it a risky choice.

Cloud backup options with Spin.AI

Cloud backups offer greater flexibility to healthcare organizations while providing the same off-site, off-network reliability of on-site data backup methodologies. Since cloud storage will exist on a different network, your backed-up data will remain inaccessible to malicious actors in case of a breach. Additionally, the accessibility, affordability, and scalability offered by cloud backup providers like Spin.AI make it the ideal choice for healthcare organizations. With Spin.AI, organizations can meet compliance requirements, set up automated backups, secure multiple SaaS applications, and store backup data at 32 locations worldwide.

Hybrid Approaches

Many organizations also choose to go the hybrid way, storing part of their backup data on the cloud and the remaining on-premises. This allows them to tap into the advantages of both options without being locked into cumbersome manual data backup processes. Cloud storage can complement on-site backup, offering healthcare organizations more flexibility and scalability while still keeping their most important data sets offline and out of the hands of cyber attackers.

Developing a comprehensive data recovery plan

Accelerated data recovery is key to minimizing the damage wrought by data breaches. The ability to quickly restore data to its previous location within a network ensures companies can quickly recover and get back to normalcy in the event of an attack. And the first step to doing that is crafting a robust data recovery plan. Here’s how.

Identifying valuable assets

According to the World Economic Forum, over 30% of all data generated in the world is generated by hospitals alone, equating to about 50 petabytes. However, not all data is built the same. Before you implement your data backup and recovery solutions, you must understand what your data contains, how people interact with it, and where it resides. Identifying the most important data assets and pinpointing their location will ensure quick restoration of the most critical services.

Implementing backup methods

Once you’ve identified your most important data assets and completed your risk assessment, you need to work on choosing your data backup and recovery methods. You can use on-site backup options to store data offline or a service provider like Spin.AI to back up the most important files to the cloud based on your priorities.

Regulatory compliance

The cost of non-compliance with regulatory frameworks such as HIPAA, GDPR, and NIST is three times higher than that of compliance. Most frameworks require more than secure data backups—they require granular control over data access, third-party misconfiguration management, proactive data leaks, and data loss prevention. Ensure you use a third-party data backup provider like Spin.AI, which offers unmatched visibility and control over your backup data.

Best practices in data recovery

Even the most secure data vaults can fall to a seemingly harmless yet well-coordinated phishing attack. It is prudent to actively monitor your data backup and recovery setup to make restoring patient data quick and easy during a disaster recovery scenario.

Regular testing of backup systems

While it is tempting to forget about your data recovery solution until disaster hits, it is best to regularly test the condition of the systems to ensure they are working according to your data recovery plan. Healthcare providers need to check whether all the scheduled backups are happening on time and that different forms of data are going to the right storage locations. You should also test your team’s preparedness and ability to quickly regain access when there is a data breach.

Monitoring backup systems

Keep an eye on your backup systems even when you’re done with testing. Monitoring data integrity, network health, and access nodes should be a priority. Moreover, when working with a cloud backup service provider, you’ll have to regularly implement updates and security patches as and when they are wired through to keep your defences up at all times.

Training healthcare staff  

As discussed above, human errors account for a major chunk of all healthcare data breaches. Your cyber defences will fall short without proper training for staff members to identify, flag, and escalate suspicious events.

Your staff should also be aware of your data recovery plan and the steps for its execution. Quick data recovery and damage mitigation can only happen if healthcare staff know the exact steps to take when a data breach occurs.

The role of data in patient care

All the stakeholders involved in patient care, from doctors and medical support staff to insurers and hospital managers, use patient data to make accurate, informed decisions about potential medical interventions and their impact on the patient. Each data point is critical to accelerating and optimizing patient care and healthcare service delivery. This fact alone makes safeguarding healthcare records from potential data leaks and data losses a primary objective of any cybersecurity safety plan.

Apart from patient records, data in healthcare also helps organizations optimize their operations by:

  1. Forecasting open room demands
  2. Optimizing staffing procedures
  3. Improving 30-day readmission benchmarks
  4. Predicting and managing appointments
  5. Managing complex supply chains
  6. Reducing medical errors and ensuing claims

Return on investment of effective data recovery solutions

The HIPAA Journal states that healthcare data breaches are the costliest breaches due to the sensitive nature of the stored data. Their numbers show that healthcare breaches cost, on average, $9.77 million, nearly double the average cost of all industries. In fact, non-compliance fines alone can go north of $5 million, even if we were to discount the monetary impact of service disruption.

By setting up effective data backup and recovery systems in healthcare, organizations can avoid the scrutiny of HIPAA, maintain operations and business continuity, and avoid voiding patient trust.

As the industry is worst affected by data breaches, healthcare still has a long way to go. However, technological innovation and development hold quite a bit of promise. Data security solutions in healthcare are leaning towards transparency and accountability. Proactive preventive measures such as access control, MFA, and data backups are becoming the norm as opposed to most organizations’ usual reactive measures. AI and ML enable faster data recovery by automating most tasks and eliminating manual errors. Advances in computing have also led to the development of self-healing storage systems that detect and correct hardware problems before they snowball into a full-blown breach.

2024 turned out to be the worst year on record for data breaches in healthcare. Headlined by the Change Healthcare breach, the year brought data management in healthcare into the spotlight. While the world is still reeling from the aftershocks of one of the biggest data breaches of all time, organizations must actively invest in robust data recovery solutions for healthcare. Citing the critical nature of the data and services rendered, the onus lies on the shoulders of these vital organizations to take measures to safeguard patient data by setting up data backup and recovery systems.

If you have further queries, feel free to contact the data backup experts at Spin.AI.

Click here to request a free demo of SpinBackup – a comprehensive data protection and recovery solution for healthcare.

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Written by

Product Manager at Spin.AI

Will Tran is the Product Manager at Spin.AI, where he guides the product's strategic direction, oversees feature development and ensures that the solution solves his clients’ cybersecurity needs.

Will is a security professional who started his career at Lockheed Martin where he worked on National Security Space programs in business development and product management.

Will holds a BA in Economics and Mathematics from UCSB and an MBA with a specialization in Technology Management and Marketing from UCLA Anderson School of Management.

At Lockheed Martin, Will developed the multi-year strategy campaign and supported the product development of a national security satellite program for the United States Air Force, which resulted in a multi-billion dollar contract.

During business school, Will consulted 2 non-profit organizations as part of a series of national consulting case competitions. He set strategic priorities, optimized business operations, and developed a process to qualify new revenue streams for his non-profit clients. These initiatives resulted in 15-20% increase in annual surplus.

In his spare time, Will can be found at local coffee shops around Los Angeles, traveling to different countries, or hanging out with his cat.

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