Page 11 - HME Business, July/August 2021

Products and Technology
While COVID-19 ramped up the need for telehealth and remote con- nectivity for HME patients and distributed workforces, the drive to secure patients’ HME providers’ data predated the pan- demic. What are the data security challeng- es for HMEs? How should they respond?
To examine the issue, Jerry Dennany, Chief Technology Officer for industry software company Brightree LLC (brightree.com), sat down with HMEB to discuss the factors that have been driving the need to secure remote patients and staff; the increasing number of healthcare data attacks; and how providers can take steps to secure data both in terms of technology and business processes.
HMEB: What are the factors that
are driving remote access for HME employees? I imagine COVID has to be one of them, but maybe you can explain that a bit.
Jerry Dennany: There had been a number of factors prior to COVID. One of the big shifts was network access down to the home. If we rewind 20 years ago,
it wasn’t possible to have almost guar- anteed access across the United States; for almost every home to have some sort
of broadband connection allowing us to either work from home or drive the point of care right into the home.
And then COVID came along and it was almost a sentinel event that forced the issue, right? That goes for everyone from back office employees all the way through to knowledge workers, to the work-from- home environment. So the technology was ready and then COVID was that sentinel event.
HMEB: I imagine that this will have some lasting impact given that, while some employees might transition back to working in the office or working at providers’ store locations, others are going to be staying at home.
Dennany: Yes. We’re seeing a lot of companies tackle this across all industries from a hybrid point of view and certainly HMEs are doing so as well. Companies are seeing efficiency and morale gains in this shift, but burnout is also a large risk.
So workers have more difficult segre- gating the different parts of their lives. The work-life, the personal life. And the bottom line for companies is that the operating models around remote working teams has been proven out as possible and sometimes optimal. And now we need to move into optimization of that.
So, we’ve seen changes in more elec- tronic collaboration in workflows. Slack and Microsoft Teams usage has skyrock- eted, for example.
“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2020 reported well over 600 significant breaches, and that’s up from 500 or so in the previous year. So incidents are climbing.”
— Jerry Dennany, Brightree LLC
Management Solutions | Technology | Products hme-business.com | July/August 2021 | HMEBusiness 9 Untitled-17 1 7/30/21 12:28 PM