Four easy steps for organizations to hand over data control

To stay connected with patients, healthcare providers are turning to telehealth services. In fact, 34.5 million telehealth services were delivered from March through June, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The shift to remote healthcare has also impacted the roll out of new regulations that would give patients secure and free access to their health data.

The shift to online services shines a light on a major cybersecurity issue within all industries (but especially healthcare where people have zero control over their data): consent.

Hand over data control

Data transparency allows people to know what personal data has been collected, what data an organization wants to collect and how it will be used. Data control provides the end-user with choice and authority over what is collected and even where it is shared. Together the two lead to a competitive edge, as 85% of consumers say they will take their business elsewhere if they do not trust how a company is handling their data.

Regulations such as the GDPR and the CCPA have been enacted to hold companies accountable unlike ever before – providing greater protection, transparency and control to consumers over their personal data.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) regulation, which is set to go into effect in early 2021, would provide interoperability, allowing patients to access, share and manage their healthcare data as they do their financial data. Healthcare organizations must provide people with control over their data and where it goes, which in turn strengthens trust.

How to earn patients’ trust

Organizations must improve their ability to earn patients’ confidence and trust by putting comprehensive identity and access management (IAM) systems in place. Such systems need to offer the ability to manage privacy settings, account for data download and deletion, and enable data sharing with not just third-party apps but also other people, such as additional care providers and family members.

The right digital identity solution should empower the orchestration of user identity journeys, such as registration and authentication, in a convenient way that unifies configuring security and user experience choices.

It should also enable the healthcare organization to protect patients’ personal data while offering their end-users a unified means of control of their data consents and permissions. Below are the four key steps companies should take to earn trust when users hand over data control:

• Identify where digital transformation opportunities and user trust risks intersect. Since users are becoming more skeptical, organizations must analyze “trust gaps” while they are discovering clever new ways to leverage personal data.
• Consider personal data as a joint asset. It’s easy for a company to say consumers own their own personal data, but business leaders have incentives to leverage that data for the value it brings to their business. This changes the equation. All the stakeholders within an organization need to come together and view data as a joint asset in which all parties, including end-users, have a stake.
• Lean into consent. Given the realities of regulations, a business often has a choice to offer consent to end-users rather than just collecting and using data. Seek to offer the option – it provides benefits when building trust with skeptical consumers, as well as when proving your right to use that data.
• Take advantage of consumer identity and access management (CIAM) for building trust. Identity management platforms automate and provide visibility into the entire customer journey across many different applications and channels. They also allow end-users to retain the controls to manage their own profiles, passwords, privacy settings and personal data.

Providing data transparency and data control to the end-user enhances the relationship between business and consumer. Organizations can achieve this trust with consumers in a comprehensive fashion by applying consumer identity and access management that scales across all of their applications. To see these benefits before regulations like the HHS regulations go into effect, organizations need to act now.