According to surveys, around 15 million data breaches happened in the third quarter of 2022, which is 167% more than in the second quarter. These numbers are alarming and show how cybercriminals target organizations from every industry, including the dental care sector.

This blog discusses the consequences of data breaches for dental practices and how dentists can prevent their data from getting compromised.

Why Dental Practices Should Care About Data Breaches

Dental practices deal with Protected Health Information (PHI), which includes patients’ personal information, medical history, insurance details, and any government benefits they’re receiving like Medicare or Medicaid.

A data breach compromises all this patient information which can have severe legal consequences for any dental practice. Based on the type of data breach and the amount of data that is leaked, a dental office will have to pay a massive fine. Additionally, a data breach can result in a dental practice getting a negative reputation and losing several patients.

How Dental Practices Can Prevent Data Breaches

Since a data breach can cause a dental clinic significant financial loss, they need to invest in top-notch IT security services for dental practices. Learn how dental practitioners can prevent data breaches.

  • Ensure that employees receive training on cybersecurity practices, as 88% of data breaches happen due to a mistakeby a staff member
  • Implement advanced security features in all of your systems, servers, networks, and workstations; these include multi-factor authentication when logging into an application or enhanced spam-filtering for emails to prevent email phishing
  • Backup your data regularly so that you can recover it if any problem results in data loss
  • Assess your systems regularly to detect and fix any security vulnerabilities

A dentist showing a patient’s x-ray on a laptop

Hire Foris IT Management to Prevent Data Breaches

Dental practices can keep their data secure and avoid any legal consequences with the help of Foris IT Management’s dental IT services. Our IT security service for dental practices in Texas backup data in the cloud regularly so that it can be recovered if needed.

Additionally, our IT support for dentists also provides cybersecurity training to employees. Our managed IT service for dentists also assesses and audits the system regularly, detecting any vulnerabilities.

Book a free consultation and keep your dental practice safe from data breaches.