HIPAA access control: The key to keeping patient data safe

HIPAA access control is the first HIPAA Technical Safeguard Standard.  HIPAA compliance describes access control as the responsibility of all healthcare providers to allow access only to those users (or software programs) that have been granted access rights.

No matter how much healthcare organizations spend on protecting their network perimeter, the investment can be completely undone by lax internal user security. Here, we outline what organizations can do to improve HIPAA access control to meet HIPAA Security Rule requirements.

In healthcare, user access to data can often be a matter of life and death: doctors need to be able to pull up a patient’s record at a moment’s notice to make informed decisions. But organizations need to strike a balance between making data immediately accessible to the right people, while restricting access for those who do not need it to do their job.

Getting these access restrictions and controls right is crucial, especially as organizations face more scrutiny on HIPAA compliance.

Our research into healthcare data access compliance found that the lack of unique logins, manual logoffs, and use of concurrent logins puts patient data at risk.

They underline why a strong security posture expects end users to act outside the boundaries of policy (and sometimes common sense). They may be careless and are often exploited. Rather than blaming users, IT security teams can better protect their network against unwanted access and verify identities.

Healthcare IT teams look to ensure that all network access is via a login that is unique to the employee, not shared, and that all actions thereafter can be tied to the specific individual.

Implementing security measures like two-factor authentication (2FA) for healthcare is standard practice to verify that users are who they say they are, and it is key to supporting HIPAA compliance.

Here are basic security practices that healthcare IT teams can put in place to support HIPAA access control requirements, and how UserLock can help.

UserLock ensures that nobody can log on to the system without uniquely identifiable credentials.

UserLock prevents concurrent logins with the same set of user credentials, helping to eradicate dangerous password-sharing practices.

UserLock helps administrators verify all users’ identity with strong HIPAA MFA, making users accountable for any activity, malicious or otherwise.

UserLock enables the administrator to set granular, role-based access controls (RBAC) since policies can be set by AD user, group, or OU. This helps ensure that employees can only access the information they need to do their job.

UserLock allows administrators to easily change access rights (permanently or temporarily) for individual AD users, groups, or organizational units (OUs). These controls follow the same logic you already use to manage policies in Active Directory.

UserLock's Active Directory MFA directly supports HIPAA technical safeguards by adding a second factor of authentication to verify that the person who has the correct ID and password is who they say they are.

UserLock also strengthens unique network login credentials with context-aware access restrictions and user reminders, which help verify that a person seeking access to the network and the information within is genuinely who they say they are.

UserLock monitors all logon and logoff activity in real-time to ensure that the only people who can access vital data are the people who need to.

UserLock alerts administrators to any suspicious, disruptive, or unusual logins based on time, location, and device.