Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc., a private, not-for-profit healthcare organization dedicated to providing medical, dental and health-related human services to low-income families and the uninsured in South Texas, has strengthened its IT security program and improved HIPAA compliance with Tenable Network Security's SecurityCenter Continuous View™ (SecurityCenter CV™). Methodist Healthcare Ministries works with community partners, other nonprofit organizations and local hospital systems in 74 counties across South Texas. Tenable’s advanced auditing and analytics dashboards help the Methodist Healthcare Ministries security team report security and compliance status to its board of directors and also help the organization set a standard that encourages the entire South Texas healthcare partner network to improve HIPAA compliance. “Methodist Healthcare Ministries plays a key role in the regional healthcare safety net, so we needed to invest in a comprehensive cybersecurity solution that could detect and remediate threats across a geographically dispersed IT environment,” said James Kahl, network administrator, Methodist Healthcare Ministries. “Because we work with such a large number of clinics and providers, we needed visibility into everything passing through our network to ensure that our partner organizations meet the same HIPAA compliance standards and expectations that Methodist does.”
With SecurityCenter CV, Methodist Healthcare Ministries is able to secure critical servers and primary data systems, like the organization’s patient database. The organization was also able to immediately identify at-risk systems, including unpatched instances of Heartbleed and a vulnerability in a connected medical device used to detect and prevent blindness in patients with diabetes.
Passive scanning capabilities in SecurityCenter CV enhance vulnerability management by continuously observing network traffic to make sure patient privacy is always protected, even in between traditional active vulnerability assessments. Aggregating log and event data further extends visibility into network activity by allowing the security team to quickly and easily search for specific events and the incident response team to be alerted of anomalous events requiring an immediate response.
“SecurityCenter CV gives us an accurate, real-time view of the entire Methodist Healthcare Ministries enterprise,” said Kahl. “With Tenable, we can hold ourselves and our partners to a higher standard of security compliance, which allows Methodist Healthcare Ministries to focus on our mission to provide quality community healthcare to those in need.”
