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A decade ago, running a successful med spa business would have been down to the quality of service you offer. But, a few years later, in the age of telehealth and managing large data volumes, providers have another success factor to consider—patient data security.
In the past 12 months, 88% of healthcare organizations have experienced an average of 40 attacks – with an average total cost of a cyber attack of nearly $5 million. The US Department of Health and Human Services Cybersecurity Program shows us that the top threads against medical health records are poor encryption, phishing attacks, and employees.
Even the slightest data breach can lead to patient identity theft and fraud, damaging your brand image and patient trust.
If you are wondering how you can safeguard your patient’s health journey, this blog discusses how you can maintain security with practice management software.
Understanding med spa regulatory standards and compliance
To avoid any legal trouble and stay compliant with regulations, med spa owners must ensure everything’s running smoothly and by the book. To do that, med spas must follow some key regulatory bodies and compliance standards.
GDPR Compliance
GDPR compliance is the UK and EU’s leading privacy and data protection law.
It regulates how personal data is processed and protects the data of all EU citizens and residents, regardless of their physical location.
HIPAA compliance
HIPAA, the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, is a crucial regulation for businesses working with PHI (Protected Health Information).
This includes healthcare providers, health plans, and healthcare clearinghouses.
Failure to comply can result in significant non-compliance penalties ranging from $100 to $50,000 per violation, depending on the severity.
Cyber essential certificate
Cyber Essentials is the UK government information assurance certificate that demands organizations incorporate strong information security practices.
It offers an assurance framework alongside a handful of other security controls that shield patient and business information from online scammers and cyber attacks.
Education & Training
With the landscape of cybersecurity threats and security laws constantly evolving, it is crucial to stay educated on the latest cybersecurity protection practices.
Regular training ensures employees are well-informed and know how to protect patient data.
This proactive approach not only prevents data breaches but also fosters a culture of accountability and awareness within the team.
In addition, staying updated on regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR helps med spas avoid dealing with legal claims and penalties.
What measures should a medical spa take to ensure the security of patient data?
To safeguard sensitive patient information, medical spas must go beyond basic security measures and implement a comprehensive approach to data protection.
One of those tried-and-tested strategies is taking advantage of the benefits of robust practice management software with features that ensure maximum health and patient data security.
🔐Adopt HIPAA-compliant systems
If you want to sleep better at night, you must adopt HIPAA-compliant software for your med spa. It’s that simple, and you need it because your medical business deals with sensitive patient information. That data must be protected and kept strictly private and secure in accordance with HIPAA’s legal requirements. Look for software solutions with built-in features that comply with HIPAA.
📢 Here’s the good news — Pabau is HIPAA-compliant!
It allows clients to use a HIPAA support toggle and activate their compliance. Keep in mind that using Pabau’s HIPAA functionality alone won’t make you HIPAA compliant.
You still have to implement the required legal policies and procedures to ensure compliance with the necessary regulations before using Pabau’s HIPAA and security features. If this is the first time you doing this, having a HIPAA compliance checklist can be your handy guide.
🚧Implement role-based access control
To safeguard sensitive patient data, you need to restrict access to who can access it.
You can restrict access based on different employee roles so that only authorized staff can view and modify sensitive patient data.
For example, your reception staff may only need access to basic patient information, such as appointment history and contact details, but they’ll need access to the patient’s medical history or treatment plans. On the other hand, nurse estheticians and doctors may need more detailed access to patient records, including past treatments, allergies, and prescribed medications.
You should be able to limit exposure and grant access only to those who need it for their specific duties, reducing the risk of data breaches or unauthorized access.
⚠️Perform risk assessment
Medical risk assessments should be conducted at least annually to proactively identify potential risks and explore ways to mitigate them.
This process should also be undertaken whenever significant changes are implemented that could introduce new risks.
Here are some of the key checkups that happen during a med spa risk assessment:
- Identifying events or procedures and associated hazards: Make a list of all workplace and procedural hazards, from slippery floors and power outages to more serious concerns
- Checking your staff’s qualifications: Ask yourself when your staff last went through training and are all your physicians certified to perform the services they provide.
- Maintain updated insurance coverage: Revise all your insurance policies, and check if they need to be renewed.
📖Train employees on data security
Employees are often the first line of defense—a study shows that 88% of data breaches were the result of employee errors.
To prevent employees from accidentally exposing patient data, quality cybersecurity education is required.
You need your staff to have extensive training on the best practices for patient data privacy so they understand their roles and obligations in handling patient’s sensitive data. Here are some examples of training topics that med spa employees should receive to ensure strong data security:
- Data protocols: Explain how, when, and who should access patient data and how to handle that data during routine tasks, like locking the computer or device when stepping away from the workstation or using HIPPA-compliant software.
- Password management: Teach your staff to create strong, unique passwords and to regularly update them and avoid the reuse of passwords across different platforms.
- Phishing awareness: To avoid threads, employees should be trained to recognize phishing emails, fake links, and suspicious attachments.
⚙️Ensure secure practice management software
Investing in secure practice management software adds an extra layer of protection to your med spa’s data and keeps it safe from cyberattacks.
Pabau secures your sensitive data via various security measures, such as
- Encryption
- Staff and patient permissions for access controls
- Cloud backup
- 2 Factor Authentication to secure the client’s login details,
Payment data security by integrating Stripe (one of the biggest global payment tools)
Key features of practice management software that enhance data security
- Encryption
According to the HIPAA Journal, healthcare breach costs in 2024 reached $9.77 million. To prevent this, healthcare organizations have adopted robust software with top-tier encryption to secure patient files, including photos, videos, alerts, and other sensitive data.
- Access control
Access control features in software are paramount. Say you have a patient, and you want only one doctor to have access to their medical records. You can set up the system so that only they can view their files.
- Automated backups
Regular backup and cloud storage aren’t optional for clinics – they’re a must-have! In case you didn’t see, there was a Microsoft software update that went wrong, causing chaos at airports, private practices and more.
You need software that protects against data loss and provides robust disaster recovery procedures to ensure your patient data is always preserved and can be restored in situations like system failure, natural disasters, or other incidents you cannot predict.
- Audit trails
Audit logs are important because they document every activity within your software used across your med spa. You need this functionality to track your staff and see who accessed specific healthcare data, their actions, and the information they viewed.
- Secure communication
Every piece of information that goes from one channel to another should be safe and secure. Whenever you send emails or SMS messages internally, among staff members, or externally, to clients, that information must be secured with strong end-to-end encryption.
Pabau’s security features for patient data protection
With the healthcare industry being the prime target for cybercriminals for 13 years in a row, with data breaches costing an average of $10.99 million per breach. These numbers should be a reason good enough why securing your patient should be your number one priority.
Here are the features Pabau uses to ensure maximum health and patient data security.
🚧Customizable staff and patient permission
Permissions are a huge security asset when handling patient data.
Pabau offers highly customizable permissions that can be ticked and unticked to grant or revoke team members’ access to the data they need.
The software is designed with features for you to manage your staff permissions and choose who can have access to areas such as dashboards, team calendars, leads, clients, analytics, stock, marketing, money, activities, and setup.
What is great about this functionality in Pabau is that you can manage patient permissions in two ways
- From your client’s card: Here, you can enable/disable permissions for your patients and allow them to add their meds and allergies, see prescriptions, invoices, EMR, and more – all in one place.
- From your online bookings: Here, you can hide/show patient/team member photos, practitioners’ job titles, service costs, clinic reviews, etc.
🆔 Two-factor Authentication (2FA)
Two-factor authentication (2FA) reduces the risks of data exposure by securing the client’s login details.
For example, if a patient’s account password has been compromised, they’ll still be able to sign in through a secondary channel, typically via an SMS. Without approving this 2FA authentication, nobody can access the client’s logins.
Pabau’s 2FA feature ensures only the account owner can log in securely using an authorization code sent via SMS.
💳 Patient Payment Data Security
For the highest level of PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance and the most secure card transactions, Pabau integrated Stripe.
Stripe is among the biggest global payment tools, with 4,581,973 websites using it.
Stripe adds various extra layers of security for patient data. It encrypts all patient card numbers and prevents its internal systems from accessing the data.
📸 Patient Photos Data Security
Pabau allows clients to automatically upload patient photos to their client records.
Featuring patient photos in your EMRs (Electronic Medical Records), practitioners can quickly identify patients and reduce patient product, diagnosis, or treatment errors, especially in case of an emergency.
Pabau’s EMR system securely stores patient photos, health status, diagnosis, consent forms, lab tests, lab results, etc. You can review and approve their photos and obtain a patient consent form before sharing them. When photos are uploaded to our software, Pabau uses an advanced ‘sensitive image detection’ tool to notify you of any images you might want to keep private.
📅 Linked Third-party Apps
Sharing API keys — the codes used to identify and authenticate apps or users — with linked third-party apps puts your clinic’s security at a higher risk.
When and if needed, you can use Pabau’s software to share, limit, and disable them. Or, you can restrict third-party app access to these API keys and secure all sensitive data.
🔗All-around encryption
Encryption is a process Pabau has incorporated since the start. It uses high-level encryption to secure patient files, including photos, videos, alerts, and other sensitive patient data.
To protect this data, it uses encryptions such as:
- HTTPS (end-to-end encryption) to secure data transition and prevent third parties from accessing it.
- SSL Technology Protocols are a standard technology for encrypting data sent between servers or browsers. They prevent hackers from accessing patient information and ensure a safer website experience.
- PCI DSS Level 1 encryption to secure credit card and payment information while reducing the risks of fraud and credit card information theft.
- ISO 27001 ISMS to help practices overcome unforeseen security breaches concerning technology, patients and employees, and system processes.
- FIPS 140-2 is used by US federal bodies to protect sensitive data from being compromised.
- AES-256 encryption to fight against aggressive hacker attacks.
Additional patient data safety measures
Pabau takes an extra step to protect and secure all your patient data via:
✔️ Ongoing monitoring: If there is an issue, we’ll be the first to know and respond accordingly, using a refined early detection system.
✔️ Backups: Pabau’s system is backed up daily, and the files are stored across various safe locations. All files are also backed up for six months from the current month.
✔️ Multiple protection policies: Pabau implements strong password policies, session timeouts, and automatic sign-outs every 24 hours.
✔️ ‘Sensitive data/email’ feature boosts security when processing patient information.
📈 Elevate your med spa’s patient data security with Pabau
To wrap up, everything is now becoming digital and reliant upon software. The safety and security of sensitive patient data should be one of your top priorities when running your medical spa.
That’s why you need robust practice management software like Pabau, which doesn’t leave valuable patent data to chance but delivers key data security features for the safest experience for you and your patients.
Pabau is HIPAA and GDPR-compliant with functionalities that ensure clients using our software meet their obligations.
So book a demo with us and see how we can streamline your patient data and keep it stored, sealed, and secured at all times.
