The Future of Healthcare, IT Security, and Cybersecurity
Matthew Wallace: Since the beginning of the pandemic, last March, really, really after the first week of March, we sent all of our employees home, which was a really interesting move for our team.
We have about 200 employees across the state of Louisiana. And in our work, we do a lot of home and community-based services. So we are very much used to going into the homes of our participants, we visit them on a monthly basis, we’re checking in on them, we’re secure, ensuring that their services are being delivered accurately, that they’re safe in their homes.
And COVID-19, unfortunately, has had a very desperate effect on individuals with disabilities. And so to keep them safe, we really move to an entire telehealth environment, which is was not normal for our team members. Really, they were used to that face-to-face interaction. So pivoting our folks from and from a home-based and office-based culture to working from home where they were working on their own devices, they were using their own internet, which of course, across our state can be the very rule and we don’t even have broadband as in a lot of states, something folks weren’t necessarily thinking about.
Using trying to communicate back with servers that we still have, we really hadn’t moved things to the cloud yet proved very challenging. And so we really convenient technology Task Force early on. We invested in over 100 new laptop computers for our folks in the field, we provided a technology supplement to our team to allow them to bump up their internet packages. And then we also turned our eyes towards security.
We’re a Google suite within our organization, which provides us with the VA to secure our data in the cloud there we rolled out new password requirements for our team members. And that’s also what brought us to paubox we really started transferring data a lot more in a digital space and, and sending documents back and forth both to our participants, but also to our funders at the state. And we had to make sure that all of our data was HIPAA compliant, safe.
And that’s probably what we found a benefit of the paubox solution to add to our IT staff because it was seamless, it was on the back end, our people were never really noticed. Just one day was turned on and it was working. And we had the peace of mind that from end to end those messages and data was safe and encrypted, which previously other solutions we looked at really relied on our team members to add that layer to turn something on before they send an email and even our best-intentioned team members can very easily forget to do that.
So we look to other automatic solutions like that to help allow our team to focus on what they do best which is provide the services directly to our team members versus having to worry about the security of data.
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About Aaron Collins Aaron Collins is the systems administrator for the Developmental Center of the Ozarks. He is well versed in the building and maintenance of HIPAA compliant environments, firewall administration, FileMaker databases, Mitel phone controllers, and network administration.
About Matthew Wallace Matthew Wallace is the vice president of strategic initiatives and partnerships at Easterseals Louisiana. He’s passionate about the health of all people; he believes that when people are healthy, communities are healthy and thrive. In his current role, Wallace oversees government affairs, development, and communications.
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