CYBERSECURITY AWARENESS MONTH 2021 Week Three | Explore. Experience. Share. A mature healthcare cybersecurity program is the shared responsibility of staff, service providers, and leaders. Normalizing cybersecurity into your daily practice requires a commitment to adopting behavioral changes through a meaningful education program. Often cybersecurity education programs are designed through the lens of compliance or risk mitigation; with little thought to whether the information is meaningful to the user. The creation of a user-friendly phishing education campaign can teach your users how to id ..read more

There are some important changes for healthcare facilities that participate in Joint Commission accreditation. In July of this year, there will be new and revised emergency management (EM) standards and elements of performance (EP), applicable to hospitals and critical access hospitals. This comes after a comprehensive review and rewrites by The Joint Commission. The existing EM chapter standards and elements of performance (EM.0.01.01 through EM.04.01.01) were deleted, replaced with new standards and supporting elements of performance. There are also some changes to the environment of care (L ..read more

Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2021 Week One | Know Your Data. Know Your Risk. Aligning cybersecurity governance with enterprise risk management and continuity planning steering committees is an essential step in improving your organization’s resiliency. Leading healthcare systems are integrating efforts across disciplines to mitigate cybersecurity risks through the adoption of the Health Industry Cybersecurity Practice (HICP) published by CISA 405d Task Force. Use this resource to help identify possible threats to your cybersecurity program and important mitigation practices to help improve yo ..read more

CYBERSECURITY AWARENESS MONTH 2021 Week Two | Be Phish Smart + Combat Ransomware Email phishing and ransomware attacks are two of the top cybersecurity threats to healthcare organizations. To protect your data from these two threats, you should work with your information security team to understand how you can adopt safer email and Internet practices in your daily work environments.  In our Healthcare Cybersecurity Quick Guide, you will find actionable steps you can take today to reduce the threat of phishing and ransomware.  FILL OUT THE FORM BELOW TO DOWNLOAD a quick guide to comb ..read more

Since early on in our COVID-19 response, Wakefield Brunswick's been working to advise our client partners across the United States on response and planning activities that healthcare organizations can take to assist in preparing and responding for impact to their organizations. In this short 5-minute video, our Vice President of Client Services Christopher Sonne, is discussing some alternative staffing solutions to try in your healthcare organization. Below you can read the transcript from this video: Early on in this pandemic, we talked about the potential for secondary or tertiary phases of ..read more

Lessons the COVID-19 Pandemic Has Taught Us: Part 1. Healthcare organizations are being put to the ultimate test across the country regarding response to a public health crisis. They have had to adopt new means of continuing safe patient care and further review their key revenue drivers to ensure that they would withstand the throes to come. Broadly speaking, we encountered – and continue to uncover – many areas of opportunity throughout the trajectory of the pandemic. Below you will find three opportunities for improvement in your continuity of operations plan. Minimizing the financial impact ..read more

The team at Wakefield Brunswick regularly receives questions that push us beyond our immediate experience, especially as the COVID-19 pandemic has unfolded. To better serve our community, we’d like to bring these questions and answers to you as considerations for your own professional experience. Today's question is about engaging with executive leadership as part of the COVID-19 response. "Our discussions are at the emergency management and incident command system level, but not at the executive level. Our executives are having conversations, but they're not coordinating with us in the comma ..read more

We are often asked, why do you give away so many resources for free? It's true, when you consider our Leadership Briefing Template - a powerpoint template you can use to communicate with your executives and increase leadership buy-in, and our COVID-19 Resource Collection, which includes more than 30 resources we created to help healthcare organizations respond to the pandemic - we're putting out a lot of free options! Truly, it boils down to this: Preparedness benefits everyone. We are all interconnected in the way we serve; in our communities, our industry, and in our shared circumstances. Ev ..read more

Every healthcare resiliency program needs a Steering Committee. It's common to bump-up against difficulties obtaining leadership buy-in throughout this process, so it's important to have a group dedicated to supporting your program. DOWNLOAD: STEERING COMMITTEE CHARTER TEMPLATE What Is a Steering Committee? Your Steering Committee is not a working group, but rather a committee of executives responsible for the overall leadership of your healthcare resiliency program. Their role is to review progress reports and make decisions based on the updates and data you provide to them during regularly ..read more

A CHECKLIST FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS DURING AND AFTER DISASTERS It is recommended you collect information from the outset of the event to capture all costs potentially eligible for reimbursement. This checklist is intended to assist you through the financial recovery process including, Requests for Public Assistance (RPA). The Hospital Incident Command System (HICS) provides a set of valuable tools to assist organizations in the documentation (and tracking) of expenses and staff time during an incident. It is recommended that Hospital Incident Management Teams look to begin expense docume ..read more