Date of Conferral

7-2-2025

Degree

Doctor of Information Technology (D.I.T.)

School

Information Systems and Technology

Advisor

Cheryl Waters

Abstract

Health information technology (IT) professionals are consistently seeking better ways to balance the availability of patient health information (PHI) with data breach prevention, as these breaches negatively impact health organizations legally and ethically due to the exposure of PHI. However, some health IT professionals lack strategies to protect PHI against cybersecurity attacks. Grounded in Dr. Edward Hutchins’ distributed cognition framework, the purpose of this qualitative pragmatic inquiry was to understand what strategies health IT professionals use to protect PHI against cybersecurity attacks. The participants were six IT professionals from Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia with at least five to seven years of experience in, or knowledge of, healthcare cybersecurity. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and a review of existing literature. Through thematic analysis, six themes were identified: strategies in healthcare cybersecurity, cybersecurity challenges in healthcare, strategies for improving cybersecurity in healthcare, strategies to build expert cyber teams, strategies to reduce PHI data breaches, and strategies to create a cybersecurity learning environment. Health IT professionals can use these strategies to establish a continuous training environment and adopt innovative methods to improve the protection of PHI. The implications for positive social change include the potential for health IT professionals working in underserved communities to use these strategies for the enhancement of their health organizations‘ cybersecurity programs.

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