Behind the Screens: Ensuring the Safety of Your Data in Social Care

It happens every time you navigate to a new website. Instant pop-ups asking you to allow cookies. Allow the website to collect and track your data. It sounds more sinister than it is though. Websites don’t sit and judge your every move once you’ve accepted the cookie-tracking pop-up. But that’s a discussion for another day.

How does the increased focus on data security translate to social care? To vulnerable individuals who might not have the ability to consent to data collection? And how do the ambitions of replacing paper with digital impact this?

Beyond Digital Social Care Records (DSCR), other new technologies are also coming to social care. VR, AI, sensors, and all these new tools. All rely on data.

Is everything getting a little “too digital”?

In many cases, data can be helpful to prevent long-term problems or just to understand care recipients and their preferences better.

But you might ponder: Are my data safe? What do they use it for? How can I make sure that I did my best with data protection?

One of the Tech Care podcast episodes focused on big data and surveillance. Our guest talked about CCTVs and sensors in use for safety and preventative reasons. A useful suggestion to make sure nothing untoward happens. But also a strain for staff to have to work with a camera spying on everything they do. Not exactly a vote of confidence in their ability to do their job either.

With more and more data collected, attention automatically falls on cybersecurity. As the amount of data increases, we become more vulnerable if intruders were to access this data. It needs to be kept safe and secure. Only available to relevant people.

The Nigerian prince scam and other phishing scams are something we’ve all been exposed to. Most of the time people simply delete the emails. But once in a while, they find a victim.

What happens if that victim is one in your organisation with access to vulnerable people’s data as well?

It’s essential to build fail-safes into your online security. That could be 2-factor authentication or confirmation when signing into an account from a new device/location.

Mark Brown, the founder of Psybersafe, has been working to deliver behaviour-changing cybersecurity training that protects businesses and their employees.

In short, many of our online mistakes are avoidable. And they work to educate people on how to not fall into danger. Think password strength, scam emails, and suspicious links.

With certain changes, you can avoid profiles being hacked or stolen etc.

Mark Brown acknowledges that it’s easier said than done to make “a few changes”.

“Behaviour takes time to change, to embed. Habits are almost hardwired in our brains after a while. Older habits are far more sticky than new habits. It’s the bad habits that we need to break and replace them with new habits. That takes time.

“The big issue with people adopting habits is that effort. Why should I bother to do something extra? Fundamentally, as humans, we’re lazy, and our brains are lazy, and our brain, much like us, we’d far rather not make the effort if we don’t have to.”

With all the new tech tools and devices it is essential to make sure your data are safe. Right now, transforming care records into digital is at the top of the priority list.

The NHS Transformation Directorate has created a list of all the digital suppliers that qualify for their requirements to help care providers. The Assured Solution List. The assured solution list has strict requirements for solutions looking to join. Especially around cybersecurity. You can rest assured knowing that any technology on the assured solution list is using state-of-the-art security measures to protect your data.

Sekoia is on the assured solution list. We are Cyber Essentials Plus certified. That means we have completed a comprehensive audit of Sekoia and the company by an external assessor. On top of that, we also have other security measures in place including:

Roles & Rights

In Sekoia, every user is assigned a role. With varying rights. That means you can log in and access data everywhere. Sekoia also creates a log of which users make changes in the system.

GDPR

All data is encrypted so only authorised people can access it. We have a Data Processing Agreement that ensures all data is handled in the safest way possible.

99,97% Uptime

A major concern when going digital is the fear of the system being offline. We’re monitoring the system 24/7 and have no service windows. That’s why Sekoia has an uptime of 99.97%.