We all know how important it is to protect our patients’ information. Working in healthcare, we deal with extremely sensitive information every day from patient addresses and dates of birth to medical diagnoses and medications.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) provides us with some guidelines to follow, but securing our patients’ private information, as well as our own, takes more than watching what we say. We need to make sure all our technical systems are secure from cyber criminals. That’s why we have Jason Wheeler on our side. As the Information Security Administrator, he is the newest member of our IT Department.

Jason’s position is new to our organization and extremely important. It’s his job to oversee the security of our information technology. That includes things like spam and phishing emails, and IT compliance.

“Security is one of the cornerstones to any organization,” Jason said. “Luckily Mountain Park hasn’t had any major external breaches, but we can see them happening all over the healthcare industry.”

Back in the summer of 2016, Banner Health suffered a major breach in which hackers stole the information of nearly three million Banner patients. “That breached raised awareness for us that we could be next,” said Jason. It’s his job to make sure all our systems are secure from hackers.

“Without the necessary policies in place, we can’t have a working security framework,” said Jim Hall, director of IT infrastructure. “Jason is going to continue to build upon existing policies and procedures around information security by introducing policies that will fill existing gaps.”

“Security is a matter of policy regulation, but it shouldn’t be oppressive,” said Jason. “I want our staff to be aware of potential threats not just for work purposes, but also for their personal lives. Privacy is important.

Jason has been working in IT for nearly 20 years and in IT security for about 12.

“I got into computers young,” he said. “That was the big thing.” When he was 16, Jason started working for a company called Symantec in the antivirus department. He shared that he got into security because he wanted to work for a single organization rather than working for an IT agency that served several different organizations.

“Security has to be internal,” Jason said. “Security also provides the largest challenge because you have to not only be aware of all possible threats, but you also need a solid understanding of everything else IT related.”

“Jason is a great fit for the position because he brings experience and professionalism to the role and is passionate about what he does,” said Jim. “Jason understands the need for information security and the balance required by the organization to accomplish our mission in the communities we serve.”