Cyber-security Attacks | Dr. Eric Roman

For the past years, I've had the opportunity of working with literally over 3 billion dollars of incredible emerging and mid-market dental groups through my work in the Dentist Entrepreneur Organization. And, for better and for worse, we get an incredible cross-section to what's going on right now across so many different locations, several thousand locations across the country.

And one of the things that has become more and more and more common are cybersecurity attacks. And as much as–of all the things I've watched, I think it's the one thing that makes me feel most helpless – right? And it's been the same way for so many of the of the of the dentists and entrepreneurs that we've seen wake up in the morning and go in to see a pop up on their main screen that's now telling them they owe X number of Bitcoin to be able to have access to their data ever again. And if they don't pay that X number of Bitcoin, their data is gone forever. 

Not only do we have our HIPAA risks and all the, all the information privacy risks that have now been breached and the worries about that because, I mean, that's paramount for us as providers, we know how important it is to protect our patients' data, but there's a consideration that all the data may just be lost forever.

And what do you do then? I don't even know who my patients are. I don't even know what appointments we have scheduled. And so, it's been heartbreaking to watch how many people have gone through that exact scenario time and time again. They're more frequent. They're also becoming significantly more expensive. And a number of the cybersecurity experts I've talked to have said, listen, it's not a question of if somebody is going to try and take you down with a cybersecurity attack. The question is how prepared you're going to be, and how far they're going to get. That's the real question for all of us. 

And so it begs a similar question to my point with servers, but who's your team? Who's your team? And how capable is your team of managing this scenario when it pops up and when it's your practice or your company that's now targeted or in the crosshairs of, of these cyber terrorists, and then watching this play out time and time again, again, there's not a- there aren't great solutions for us to be able to pay for that are really going to help us sleep awesome at night knowing that they're well covered. We need practice management solutions that have best in-class cybersecurity protection, that have team members or departments dedicated to a level of defense that we could only dream of as practice operators.