2020-05-16

Practical Paranoia - Protecting Personal Devices

Personal computing devices (laptop, notebook, tablet, desktop) may support clinical work when physicians take call from remote sites, or otherwise participate in the provision of healthcare services outside AHS facilities. 

Because identifiable personal health information could appear on data storage devices which, if stolen, could risk a privacy breach, it is essential that personal devices be configured in compliance with AHS policy and legislative requirement, including:
  • Password protection with a strong and well maintained code
  • Inactivity timeouts that re-challenge for a device password after automatic system suspend or sleep states
  • Hard drive encryption
  • Firewall protection
  • File sharing off or appropriately protected
Encryption is a method of protecting information by converting it to a format that's unreadable by anyone except those with a special key (usually a very long password). All Windows operating system devices must have native hard drive encryption enabled (BitLocker). All Macintosh operating system devices must also have native hard drive encryption enabled (FileVault).