Securing Infrastructure in Healthcare: Reducing Breaches and Building Resiliency

Telehealth and remote patient monitoring solutions enable healthcare providers to deliver care beyond traditional clinical settings. However, developing and deploying these digital healthcare solutions involves navigating complex challenges, particularly regarding data privacy and regulatory compliance. Ensuring adherence to HIPAA regulations while securely managing remote infrastructure adds layers of complexity for healthcare IT, security, and engineering teams.

In this blog, we will explore some common challenges digital healthcare technology companies face when developing and deploying health tech products. We will use a fictional example to illustrate the many technical and compliance hurdles that organizations must overcome. We will then document how Teleport’s innovative solution for secure infrastructure access simplifies the process, improving engineering productivity, enhancing security, and simplifying compliance audits.

Company Overview

HealthTech Innovations is a leading digital healthcare technology company that develops solutions to monitor patients' health in real time. They have several products that integrate wearable devices with Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Telehealth consultations. From a technical perspective, these products require teams to deploy and manage remote devices and server clusters. This approach necessitates secure edge access solutions to facilitate seamless and safe data exchange, ensuring compliance with stringent privacy regulations.

Infrastructure Challenges

HealthTech Innovations' infrastructure is extensive and diverse, designed to support a network of remote patient monitoring devices and telehealth services while facilitating secure data sharing with healthcare providers' EHR systems.

• Secure Remote Management: HealthTech Innovation’s wearable devices connect to the internet via an unreliable cellular network or a private network behind Network Address Translation (NAT). This presents challenges in ensuring secure data transmission and maintaining connectivity with remote devices.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): HealthTech has multiple databases and multiple integrations with a provider of EHR systems. They require a robust RBAC system to ensure that only authorized personnel and applications can access sensitive patient data.
• Audit Logging and Compliance: To comply with HIPAA regulations, HealthTech Innovations must maintain detailed audit logs of all user activities and security events. This includes tracking access to patient data, monitoring any unauthorized attempts to access critical systems, and recording sessions when critical infrastructure is accessed.

The Teleport Solution

To address these challenges, HealthTech Innovations deploys Teleport, a comprehensive solution that enhances secure edge access while ensuring HIPAA compliance.

Secure Remote Access for Edge Devices

Teleport enables HealthTech’s technical teams to manage their wearable devices and server clusters across distributed environments without the need for complex VPNs or firewall configurations. By using short-lived certificates for access, HealthTech minimizes security risks while maintaining seamless and secure connectivity for their devices. This is particularly important for wearables that constantly transmit sensitive health data to EHR systems and telehealth services. Additionally, Teleport’s support for ARM-based devices ensures compatibility with the various hardware platforms HealthTech deploys, and its ability to operate in restrictive environments guarantees secure access even in remote or challenging locations.

Teleport also helps HealthTech maintain an up-to-date inventory of their devices, enabling continuous monitoring of access permissions. This is critical for HealthTech’s large-scale deployments, where ensuring secure and reliable data exchange is essential for both patient safety and regulatory compliance. By providing HealthTech with the tools to manage their wearable devices securely and at scale, Teleport plays a key role in the company’s mission to enhance healthcare outcomes with innovative hardware and software solutions.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

HealthTech Innovations uses Teleport’s Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) feature to manage access to sensitive databases that store critical patient data from their wearable devices. With RBAC, HealthTech ensures that only authorized personnel can access specific infrastructure components such as databases, tables, or stored procedures. For example, patient data, which HealthTech stores in PostgreSQL databases, is only accessible to users with roles that meet strict security labels defined within Teleport. By associating each database and its objects with specific labels, HealthTech can configure granular access rules that limit access to sensitive data at scale. This approach helps protect patient privacy and ensures compliance with healthcare regulations, such as HIPAA, by tightly controlling who can view or modify patient records.

In addition, Teleport’s RBAC system integrates seamlessly with HealthTech’s existing identity provider, including their Single Sign-On (SSO) solution, allowing for streamlined and secure user authentication. By tying access controls to user roles and enforcing them dynamically, HealthTech can ensure access policies are consistently applied across all devices, applications, databases, and workloads. Teleport’s ability to provide granular, role-based access to HealthTech’s distributed infrastructure allows the company to maintain both security and operational efficiency as they scale an ever-expanding number of wearable devices, databases, and applications.

Audit Logging

Audit logging is an integral part of Teleport’s use case at HealthTech Innovations. All user activities and security events are logged, providing HealthTech Innovations with detailed records required for HIPAA compliance. Remote nodes report audit information through the reverse tunnel, ensuring that all logs are centralized and accessible for compliance audits.

Teleport also enables HealthTech Innovations to capture user activity with comprehensive session recording,

• Database Sessions - Teleport captures a stream of audit events related to the database being accessed.
• SSH Sessions - Teleport captures the entire pseudo-terminal (PTY) output of the session
• Kubernetes Sessions - Teleport captures the entire PTY output for kubectl exec invocations.
• Desktop Sessions - Teleport captures the contents of Windows and any mouse input. Teleport does not capture keystrokes in the remote desktop.
• App Sessions - Teleport provides secure access to web applications with a comprehensive audit report for which applications are accessed by who.

Conclusion

Teleport's secure infrastructure access solution empowers HealthTech Innovations to deliver real-time health monitoring while ensuring security and HIPAA compliance. By leveraging comprehensive remote access capabilities, application-aware access controls, and robust audit logging, HealthTech Innovations can overcome the challenges associated with secure edge access and maintain the highest standards of patient data security. As digital healthcare continues to evolve, solutions like Teleport will play a crucial role in enhancing the security and effectiveness of healthcare technologies.

For more information about how Teleport helps Healthcare organizations improve security, enhance engineering productivity, and streamline compliance processes read our white paper, or watch an on-demand webinar on the topic.