Envision this: A loved one spends a couple days in the hospital. During one of your visits, you stop in to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin.

Not long thereafter, however, you find out the hospital’s payment system has been hacked – meaning your personal data is at risk. After going through the headache of safeguarding your accounts with new passwords and maybe new account numbers, a thought strikes.

If the hospital’s payment system isn’t secure, what does that mean for the loved one’s medical records?

They may well be at risk, according to BitSight Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., which recently analyzed S&P 500 stock index companies and concluded that healthcare and pharmaceutical companies rate even worse than retailers when it comes to security performance.

Scary findings included:

• Not only did healthcare and pharma companies fare the worst, but they took the longest amount of time (5.3 days) to fix problems.

• An undisclosed healthcare company was the single-worst performer of the 500 companies reviewed.

• Healthcare companies had the highest percentage of infection with the Conficker worm – even though the malware is well-known, has been around for a long time and is relatively easy to eliminate.

This evidence is concerning, particularly since solutions are readily available.

We’ve been beating the drum for companies of all sorts to invest in a secure and robust commerce platform that offers the benefits of stored value and loyalty programs, among other incentives.

Consider some of these advantages:

Above all else, the FreedomPay Commerce Platform offers organizations the ability to leverage the highest level of payment data security (P2PE). Even better, the system deployment can be customized.

FreedomPay’s technology encrypts data from hardware-to-hardware and eliminates clear-text account data from a merchant’s environment – virtually eradicating the risk for malware to infect software and putting the merchant’s POS and network 100 percent out of scope for PCI compliance.

Meantime, companies can improve their speed of service and increase customer satisfaction. The importance of efficiency can never be understated, especially in a fast-paced environment such as healthcare.

And it reduces the time and resources spent handling cash, which can be significant. The opportunity to use mobile payment apps also is there.

Considering the tidal wave of hacking stories appearing each week, how can this not make sense (and dollars and cents)?

To learn more about how the FreedomPay Commerce Platform can fit your needs, please contact us.