Dental websites have become an essential tool in any dental practice’s marketing strategy. Not only is this used as the online presence of your dental practice, but there are plenty of websites that are designed to provide a wide range of features for patients.
Billing, personal information, appointment scheduling, these are a few features that some dental websites are now incorporating to make it easier for patients. However, the smarter these websites are becoming, the higher the risk if there is a data breach. Because of this, you need to know what to do if a data breach does occur. Learn more about how to protect your website and practice against data breaches.
Implement preventative features to minimze risk
Remember that prevention is always better, so in order to minimize the risk of data breaches, make sure to implement certain preventative features beforehand. It might seem excessive, but you are going to want to deal with these rather than having to deal with a data breach. These preventative measures can be something as simple as limiting access to patient data for low-priority staff members, or implementing an alert system if there is unusual activity in your site’s data.
Orient your staff
A large portion of data breaches occur simply because of human error, so you’re going to want to minimize the risk of this happening on this end as well. Make sure that you take the time to properly orient your staff to guarantee that they are taking the needed precautions to avoid a data breach.
It only takes one forgetful employee to compromise the entire patient database, so it’s best to do this orientation every time you take on a new staff member, and even on a regular basis. Even something as simple as making sure that you log out of your staff account can go a long way in helping minimize the risk of a data breach in your dental websites.
Have a plan of action at the ready if a data breach does occur
Sometimes, no matter how well we plan and take preventative measures, data breaches can happen. If it does happen, the best thing to do is make sure that you have a good plan of action at the ready that you can implement as soon as you know that a breach has happened.
It’s always a good idea to plan this now, when nothing has happened, as opposed to struggling to manage the crisis while coming up with a plan of action. It’s recommended that you work with your database provider to come up with the best plan of action for this event.