Privacy and Security in Healthcare: An QA Guide by QASource

Healthcare apps hold patient and organizational data, making them prime cyberattack targets. This blog highlights key challenges, testing types, AI trends, and best security testing practices for ensuring security and compliance.

Most healthcare enterprise applications contain critical data related to patients and the various organizations they serve. These applications can include health records, payment information, account details, and identity details. Due to the incredible sensitivity, thorough software security testing in healthcare is essential to prevent critical information from falling into the wrong hands.

By “wrong hands”, we mean criminals in the identity theft business, hackers skilled in malware and phishing schemes, and cyber attackers aiming to hold critical files or your entire system hostage by ransomware. While these scenarios may seem extreme, these situations sadly occur more often than expected. Hackers expect that the user might not anticipate the risk. Therefore, to prevent such situations, it is necessary to curb the attacks before they occur.

The only way to achieve this is through a robust software testing process during the development of a healthcare application. Teams can develop a strong defensive strategy by continuously executing all types of security healthcare testing, including mobile application security testing, throughout the development cycle.

In this blog, we’ll explore the role of testing, the primary challenges, and how to effectively integrate best practices to mitigate breach risk, ensure HIPAA compliance, and maintain patient trust.

What is Security Testing in Healthcare Domain?

Security testing in healthcare domain is a structured approach to evaluating systems, applications, and APIs for vulnerabilities that could compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of patient data.

It ensures compliance with healthcare regulations, such as HIPAA, safeguards sensitive medical records from cyber threats, and strengthens trust between providers and patients by proactively identifying and mitigating potential risks.

Common Privacy and Security Challenges in Healthcare

It’s essential to recognize that healthcare data security isn’t optional; it’s a foundational requirement. With patient information being both extremely sensitive and highly regulated, QA teams must constantly balance robust protection measures with seamless clinical functionality. The following are the primary security challenges in healthcare.

• Expanding Attack Surface: With EHRs, cloud services, telehealth, mobile apps, IoMT, and BYOD devices, healthcare systems now present multiple vulnerable entry points for attackers. Many of these devices, especially IoMT, aren’t equipped with security agents, making them easy pivot points into core healthcare networks.

  QASource’s Solution: Teams can implement automated attack surface management tools, conduct asset discovery, and enforce Zero Trust principles to validate devices and access, ensuring isolation and reducing the risk of lateral movement.

• Legacy Infrastructure & Unpatched Systems: Numerous hospitals and medical devices run on outdated or unsupported systems that can’t be easily patched, creating persistent vulnerabilities. The FBI warns that many legacy medical devices operate on unsupported OSes for 10–30 years, enabling attackers to exploit unpatched flaws.

  QASource’s Solution: Teams support modernization through strategies like rehosting or encapsulation, enforce regular patch cycles, and maintain detailed inventories, ensuring critical systems stay protected, even when direct updates aren’t viable.

• Insider Threats & Human Error: Misconfigurations, misplaced access credentials, phishing, and staff misuse continue to drive a large percentage of breaches. Even simple mistakes, such as misconfigured SMB protocols, can unintentionally expose thousands of systems to attackers.

  QASource’s Solution: Teams can simulate common errors, such as misassigned roles and phishing campaigns, and validate alerting, role-defined access, and corrective workflows, ensuring systems enforce safe operations and detect anomalies early.

• Evolving & Sophisticated Threats: Ransomware gangs, advanced persistent threats (APTs), zero-day exploits, and AI-enhanced attacks are increasingly targeting healthcare systems. 2025 saw teams like Interlock successfully compromise imaging devices to infiltrate networks and bypass perimeter defenses.

  QASource’s Solution: Teams can deploy breach-and-attack simulation tools (BAS) in continuous security testing pipelines and perform threat modeling to validate defenses and incident response readiness against evolving threats.

• Regulatory Complexity & Compliance Demands: Stricter and more varied regulations, such as HIPAA updates, GDPR, NIS2, and HISAA, along with fragmented frameworks, impose high compliance costs and effort. Overlapping global mandates and tighter enforcement have shifted cybersecurity from an IT concern to a strategic imperative for executives.

  QASource’s Solution: Teams incorporates automated compliance checks into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring encryption, MFA, logging, and segmentation settings adhere to frameworks like HITRUST or new rules, facilitating audit readiness and reducing legal risk.

Types of Security Testing for Privacy and Security in Healthcare

Security testing is a combined term for a variety of tests performed to verify that the healthcare application is built without exploitable weaknesses and can protect itself against all threats. It identifies flaws in the application and predicts the overall risk associated with it.

Some of the fundamental types of software security testing that need to be done before the execution of the product in the market are briefly explained below:

• Penetration Testing: Also known as pen testing or ethical hacking, it is a healthcare software testing practice that exploits the vulnerabilities within a safe testing environment. With the rise of AI-driven security tools, the effectiveness of penetration testing in multi-cloud environments has significantly increased. It is performed by collecting data, scanning it using automated tools, developing attack scenarios, analyzing the data, and creating a risk report.
• Vulnerability Testing: This is the fundamental type of testing or scanning that must be performed to prevent the use of outdated versions or misconfigured settings. It is a necessary aspect that needs to be done for the potential use of the application. Regular vulnerability testing is essential for ensuring compliance with healthcare regulations, such as HIPAA, and for safeguarding applications against emerging threats.
• SAST (Static Application Security Testing): SAST is usually known as code scanning. It is performed automatically to analyze the errors in coding, source code, and to check for security vulnerabilities before the actual execution of the developed application. It works by breaking the large code into manageable, smaller pieces and then checking each part to test for vulnerabilities, allowing them to be resolved easily.
• DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing): DAST is often referred to as black-box testing. It is dynamic, so it relates to a method that studies the security of an application while it’s running, without any actual knowledge of its source code or structure. With the increasing complexity of modern applications, DAST tools are now equipped to analyze web applications, APIs, and mobile apps in real-time, detecting vulnerabilities such as broken authentication and data leaks.
• Security Code Review: It is a highly sensitive test that must be performed during the development of a healthcare application. This process identifies and fixes potentially risky security vulnerabilities within the software’s code. Testing for these vulnerabilities early prevents issues or significant development fixes during the later stages of a development cycle. This code review is also essential as a final check to ensure the system’s code is safe and secure before market launch.

Specific Role of Security Testing in Healthcare

The healthcare domain is highly critical, and teams must handle healthcare applications with sensitivity. Due to its link with the health and safety of patients, it is essential to consider specific key points when developing applications to ensure they work efficiently and reliably.

Some of the crucial roles of software security testing in healthcare domain are listed and discussed below:

• Protecting PHI: Security testing uncovers all vulnerabilities and potential risks associated with protected health information (PHI). Decryption attempts and other attacks are also revealed by strategic security testing. To ensure that your application meets HIPAA compliance, PHI must be completely secure. Strong software security testing practices confirm that:

  • PHI doesn’t appear in URLs
  • Proper caching procedures are in place
  • SSL protocols are enforced
  • Application timeouts consistently activate
  • Access controls are gated and tokenized

• Validating Information Storage: Storing information and data for associated patients is one of the most crucial aspects of healthcare applications. The accuracy and privacy of the data are the basis for making the application work smoothly, else it will be disorganized.

  Security testing helps ensure that the data storage techniques, whether encrypted or plain-text, are safe. On a broader scale, it provides an analysis of your current security solution, encryption techniques, and policy-based data management. For example, an outdated encryption system used by a healthcare provider exposed patient records, which was rectified when security testing identified the issue.

• Protecting Data Transmission: Healthcare applications are designed to facilitate the easy transmission of data via email, drives, and electronic devices. The data should be properly encrypted and protected against unauthorized access. The data can be life-altering, and proper security testing in healthcare ensures that it is shared as intended when the following protocols are in place:

  • Strong firewall controls are in place to support data transmission across devices.
  • Data transmission over the cloud and web interface must be transmitted over SSL and use only strong security protocols, such as TLS.
  • Data transmission over email must be secured using cryptographically strong email encryption tools.
  • Users must have access to compliant file encryption tools to have system permission for sending emails with sensitive data.
  • For non-web data transmission, implement network-level encryption such as IPSec or SSH tunnelling where application-level encryption is not available.

  With the rise of secure cloud services and AI-enabled threat detection, healthcare organizations can now more effectively safeguard data during transmission.

• Validating Identity and Access Management: Security loopholes become vulnerable access points for attackers, especially if the system lacks Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. Security testing can help identify how well user roles are defined and managed throughout the software, ensuring that access approval and denial, as well as access privileges, are not weak points within the system.

  Performing these types of security checks enables a team to enhance identity validation and prevent any attempts to breach patient privacy. With the integration of machine learning, IAM systems can now automatically detect suspicious activities and unauthorized access attempts in real-time.

• Assessing Risk Before Release: We can term this the trial-and-error stage, and it is crucial. It helps identify the level of risk before an application’s scheduled risk. Teams get ample time to identify, diagnose, and address all related threats and vulnerabilities within the software during security checks.

  Teams can ensure proactive measures are in place before the software goes live. AI-powered risk assessment tools use machine learning to scan applications, detect vulnerabilities, and predict potential security risks with high accuracy.

• Improving Software Quality: Safer software is inherently better, especially in the healthcare domain. The ability to find bugs during the initial stages will reduce overall cost while ensuring a high-quality product at release time. With AI-powered testing, teams can automate quality checks, improving the speed and effectiveness of the testing process.

• Building Trust and Confidence: HIPAA compliance is the stamp of approval, and testing for security throughout your healthcare application testing process is required to attain it. Confidence in an application is why organizations decide to use it and why investors decide to invest in it. Privacy and security in healthcare play a crucial role in building trust, which can ultimately help boost the growth of your business in the long run.

  With advanced encryption methods and real-time threat monitoring, healthcare organizations can further solidify their commitment to data privacy and trustworthiness. For example, a healthcare provider used CrowdStrike for real-time threat monitoring and end-to-end encryption, building trust through enhanced data privacy.

Latest AI Trends in Security Testing in Healthcare

As artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize healthcare, it is also reshaping how we secure sensitive patient data and critical systems. AI-powered tools are playing a pivotal role in enhancing privacy and security in healthcare by identifying vulnerabilities and predicting threats.

Here are the latest AI trends transforming security testing in the healthcare sector:

1. AI-augmented Penetration Testing

   Modern QA teams are integrating AI into penetration testing to simulate real-world cyberattacks more effectively in the healthcare sector. AI helps identify hidden vulnerabilities by:

   • Learning from past threat patterns
   • Generating dynamic attack scenarios
   • Auto-prioritizing critical flaws for remediation

   This ensures that Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, telemedicine platforms, and mobile health apps are fortified against both known and emerging threats.

2. Predictive Threat Intelligence

   Using machine learning algorithms, QA teams can now proactively detect anomalies and suspicious behavior in healthcare software. Predictive threat models:

   • Analyze access patterns to spot credential misuse
   • Flag unusual data exfiltration attempts in real-time
   • Anticipate ransomware attack vectors before they occur

3. Automated Compliance Validation

   AI is increasingly used to automate compliance checks during QA cycles. Intelligent test scripts validate whether applications:

   • Store and transmit data securely (e.g., via end-to-end encryption)
   • Enforce role-based access controls
   • Maintain secure audit logs and patient consent workflows

   Such automation accelerates audit readiness and reduces the burden of manual compliance testing.

4. Self-Healing Security Tests

   AI-powered testing frameworks can now automatically heal broken security test cases when the underlying code changes. This is especially useful for agile healthcare development environments where rapid deployments risk skipping critical regression checks. Benefits include:

   • Sustained test coverage during frequent releases
   • Reduced human oversight without compromising security
   • Adaptive learning to test evolving APIs and endpoints

5. Synthetic Data for Privacy Testing

   Generating privacy-preserving synthetic data with AI is another rising trend. In QA environments, synthetic patient records:

   • Eliminate the use of real PII/PHI during test cycles
   • Preserve data utility for robust security test scenarios
   • Support scalable performance and fuzz testing under safe conditions

Conclusion

As covered in this healthcare domain tutorial, expanding security measures in your software testing strategy prohibits any kind of threat from infiltrating your software. This upfront investment pays off by preventing costly, dangerous attacks.

Despite all this, security testing of healthcare software is challenging. For instance, incomplete knowledge of the system, a lack of experts, inadequate safety and testing tools, and insufficient data for testing. An application should be designed keeping these factors in mind. Only after this, the most critical factor, privacy and security in healthcare, comes into the picture.

Adopting a security‑first mindset, integrating testing early in development, and embedding regulatory compliance into CI/CD pipelines ensure privacy and security in healthcare domain. Partner with QASource to protect sensitive records, experience faster testing cycles, fewer vulnerabilities, and smoother releases. Contact us now.