by Megan Pitkin 
During one of my recent Electronic Medical Records (EMR) classes, a student asked about best practices for creating a password. Many people use the same password for everything (and I mean everything… from accessing Facebook to logging into their online banking account). Believe it or not, passwords are often very easy to guess. In fact, here are the top three most common passwords in use today:
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Given the rampant reports about hacked accounts that have occurred in every industry, a strong password has never been more important. This is especially true in healthcare.
To create more secure passwords:
- Use passwords with eight or more characters with characters of mixed types. (Keep in mind that common substitutions for passwords like Med1c1ne are vulnerable and random combinations are difficult to remember, like m%&5Bg$d.)
- Use passphrases. Short words with characters or spaces separating are easy to recall. Rather than using common phrases, it is best to use random words as your phrase such a dog walk leash or sing_moon_jump.
- Do not use the same combination of username/password for multiple sites.
Ensuring safety and protection for patients by properly creating and protecting passwords is critical. I found it surprising that the FBI's most wanted cyber hacker got arrested the same week this question was asked of me. Why was he caught? His cat's namewas his password.
I won't elaborate on why I felt this was ironic, but I do feel it is important to highlight this cautionary tale.
Patient information is precious and should be treated appropriately since healthcare workers are the majority of keepers and the first point of contact for the electronic medical records.
Note: If you're finding it difficult to keep track of your passwords (perhaps you're following my advice and you're using different passwords for every site), consider a password manager. PC Magazine has a nice list of some of the top password managers available.
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If you like Megan's articles, you'll love her live, online classes such as Train the EMR Trainer.
I used to use the same password everywhere as it was a rather unique password and simple for me to remember. But since all the security stuff, I’ve put my own twist on it. I still use the same base password, but I blend it with the site or system name.
For example, say the password was r3drabb1t. If I were logging onto LinkedIn, my password might be linkedr3drabb1tin.
I used to use the same password everywhere as it was a rather unique password and simple for me to remember. But since all the security stuff, I’ve put my own twist on it. I still use the same base password, but I blend it with the site or system name.
For example, say the password was r3drabb1t. If I were logging onto LinkedIn, my password might be linkedr3drabb1tin.
I used to use the same password everywhere as it was a rather unique password and simple for me to remember. But since all the security stuff, I’ve put my own twist on it. I still use the same base password, but I blend it with the site or system name.
For example, say the password was r3drabb1t. If I were logging onto LinkedIn, my password might be linkedr3drabb1tin.