Securing your hospital’s network is critical for providing the best possible patient care, as well as for protecting confidential patient information. The best place to start in securing patient information on your network is to control who and what can get onto the network in the first place, and then to manage the resources that are accessible to each user.

Limiting access to your network to only authorized users and devices is the first step to protecting the information on it – but the challenge goes further than this. Even authorized users have different requirements for information. Confidential patient information should be accessible only on a “need to know” basis, and while some users like doctors and nurses need access to this data, others do not.

Therefore, securing your patient information network requires not only that you keep unauthorized users and devices off the network, but also that you can effectively provision network access privileges to provide authorized users with access to only the information they need.