Hospital networks feature multitudes of devices, including up to thousands of distributed endpoints, such as nursing station desktops, clinician tablets, and connected medical devices.
However, each of these endpoints is a potential entry point for attackers, potentially giving them access to electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI).
IT teams for healthcare companies must balance ease of use and security while maintaining HIPAA compliance. This requires centralized oversight to properly protect and manage each endpoint; otherwise, they’ll lose visibility into which devices are outdated or vulnerable.
With that in mind, let’s explore how IT teams can securely manage endpoints without interrupting users or impacting efficiency. We’ll examine the challenges healthcare IT teams face and best practices for endpoint management.
Why endpoints matter in clinical environments
Healthcare organizations, including hospitals, doctor’s offices, and so on, have a variety of endpoints to manage. This includes workstations, clinician tablets, and even Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices such as infusion pumps or wearable medical devices.
Each of these endpoints is important for patient treatment and may contain sensitive personal information. If an endpoint is compromised, that can delay treatment decisions, expose patient data, and cause multiple disruptions.
It’s no exaggeration to say that lives can depend on these devices working properly and maintaining strong levels of security.
The real challenges behind healthcare endpoint management
So, what makes managing healthcare endpoints difficult? There are several factors that can create challenges when IT teams need to update, manage, or troubleshoot endpoints, including:
Device diversity: The sheer variety of endpoint types, including IoMT devices, can make it difficult to manage everything effectively, especially from a single place.
Legacy systems: Many institutions rely on older devices that have become core parts of their tech stack but may no longer receive updates or support.
Shadow IT and BYOD devices: Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) is great for letting employees use their devices of choice, but can also make managing everything difficult. This becomes even more challenging if employees use unmanaged devices without IT’s knowledge.
Limited IT staffing: When devices have to be managed and supported manually, small IT teams can struggle to keep up with everything. Without a robust endpoint management platform, they can easily lose track of devices, miss vital updates, or fail to notice when an endpoint is compromised.
No time for downtime: Hospitals and other healthcare facilities can’t afford lengthy update processes or disruptions. This zero tolerance for downtime can make troubleshooting and patching devices even more difficult for IT teams.
How HIPAA shapes endpoint security requirements in healthcare
Different industries have specific security guidelines to follow, and in healthcare, that means maintaining HIPAA compliance.
HIPAA features multiple security rules designed to protect ePHI, including risk analysis, access control, and audit control. Healthcare organizations and their IT teams must continuously identify and address endpoint risks, maintain access security with strong access controls and authentication, protect data in motion, and so on.
More recently, proposed updates to the HIPAA Security Rules were introduced that would shift multi-factor authentication and encryption from recommended safeguards to mandatory requirements.
Without good endpoint management, it’s difficult to demonstrate HIPAA compliance and maintain security.
What recent OCR enforcement data reveals about endpoint risk
According to the HIPAA Journal’s analysis of HHS Office for Civil Rights data, in April 2026 alone, there were 47 healthcare breaches, each one impacting hundreds to thousands of patients. Over 1.3 million people had their private healthcare information exposed, putting sensitive information at risk.
Hacking and other IT incidents were the leading cause of these breaches. Cybercriminals often target known, unpatched vulnerabilities to compromise devices and infiltrate networks, gaining access to protected information that they can steal, sell, or ransom.
At the same time, many of these attacks could have been prevented with proper cybersecurity and patch management. Cyberattacks often target unpatched devices that lack protection against existing threats, as these devices provide an easy point of entry. Keeping security patches up to date and protecting against all known threats (new and old) is vital to preventing attacks.
7 components behind effective endpoint management for healthcare
So, what makes endpoint management effective for healthcare organizations? We’ve broken the essentials down into seven core components that can help IT teams manage distributed endpoints and help ensure security:
Centralized visibility: Visibility is vital for managing devices, identifying potential issues, and verifying everything is properly patched. When IT teams can view and monitor all their endpoints from one place, it’s easier to manage each of them effectively.
Automated patch management: Keeping devices patched and up to date is vital for security, but manual patching can be time-consuming and error-prone. Automated patch management helps keep devices fully patched by rolling out updates without needing manual intervention.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Role-based access control helps manage access by restricting it based on the user’s role and responsibilities. This helps improve security and accountability by keeping unauthorized users away and limiting access to sensitive information.
Encryption and remote wipe: Managing and protecting data is vital for security. This means using end-to-end encryption, which scrambles data in transit so it can’t be intercepted, along with the ability to remotely wipe devices and clear all data if they’re lost or deprovisioned.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): EDR monitors endpoints across a network for potential threats and helps security teams investigate and respond to them. This is a powerful healthcare cybersecurity tool, as it helps IT teams identify threats in real time across devices and address them before they cause damage.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): MFA helps protect accounts by adding a secondary layer of security and verification when users attempt to log in. This helps protect accounts against stolen passwords, since knowing a user’s login information alone isn’t enough to access their account.
Compliance and audit reporting: Maintaining security isn’t enough. Teams must also be able to prove they’re meeting their IT compliance requirements, which requires logs and reports that demonstrate compliance with their security policies and tools. Good reporting tools can help pass audits and demonstrate compliance by providing clear data and records as needed.
Endpoint management best practices for healthcare IT teams
IT teams managing devices and networks for healthcare organizations have a lot to manage. Fortunately, we've compiled best practices they can follow to keep devices properly patched and protected without disrupting clinical workflows.
Best practices include:
Scheduling: Updates shouldn’t interrupt daily workflows. Instead, patch windows should be scheduled around shifts so devices are updated when they’re not needed, and disruptions are kept to a minimum.
Least-privilege access: Employing least-privilege principles to access helps ensure that sensitive data remains secure. This approach limits user access to only what they need to perform their jobs, reducing the risk of unauthorized access and the potential attack surface.
Patch management: Using a patch management solution enables IT teams to deploy updates across devices without needing to manually update each one. This reduces human error and improves efficiency, keeping devices secure and compliant.
Data loss safeguards and recovery: Sensitive patient data must be protected. This includes using data encryption to protect data in transit, along with backups and redundancies to restore data in the event of a disaster.
Network safeguards: Network security is vital. This includes essential security tools such as multi-factor authentication, network access controls, network segmentation, and the isolation of high-risk endpoints.
Monitoring and response: Using endpoint detection and response or other network monitoring tools helps identify suspicious behavior and potential threats, with real-time alerts so IT teams can react quickly.
Endpoint readiness checklist for healthcare
When you’re managing endpoints, there’s a lot to keep track of, and many steps that could be easy to overlook. To help with that, we’ve created a handy checklist. Keep these points in mind, and you’ll be able to better protect endpoints across your healthcare organization:
Endpoint management: All endpoints, including mobile and medical devices, are integrated into your endpoint management platform.
Data encryption: Data remains protected while in transit with end-to-end encryption.
Patch management: All endpoints are patched and verified, and automated patch management is in place to update devices when new patches are available.
Authentication: Multi-factor authentication is enforced across devices and users to verify identity.
Inventory visibility: All endpoints are visible from a single place, including security alerts, patch status, OS versions, and applications.
Policy alignment: Your policies align with HIPAA and other relevant regulations.
Policy enforcement: Compliance policies are actively enforced across endpoints, including EDR and patching.
Clinician training: Clinicians and other staff are trained in best practices for securing and protecting their devices, including how to prevent phishing.
The role of AI in healthcare endpoint management
The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has introduced new threats, as cybercriminals can use AI to quickly create exploits for new vulnerabilities. At the same time, it has also helped drive new ways of detecting and responding to attacks.
AI-powered CVE insights can analyze common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) data to identify and prioritize the vulnerabilities that matter most, even automatically flagging basic issues for remediation. IT teams can set rules for prioritization, alerts, and escalation, so the AI-powered tool can address threats in accordance with company policy.
As a result, AI can help improve the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of threat detection and response, helping proactively protect endpoints from threats as soon as they arise.
Proactively manage healthcare endpoints from one automated console
When you need to manage multiple distributed endpoints, including clinician, BYOD, and IoMT devices, you need a robust endpoint management solution like Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management).
Splashtop AEM provides IT teams with visibility, automated patch management, compliance reporting, and more, all in one console. Healthcare IT teams can use it to manage endpoints across their environment, regardless of location, operating system, or device type.
With Splashtop AEM, it’s easy to monitor endpoint health and vulnerability status across the network, thanks to its AI-powered CVE insights. It also uses policy-based patch automation to detect, test, deploy, and verify updates across endpoints, all prioritized and scheduled in accordance with company policy.
Plus, Splashtop AEM provides policy enforcement across devices and can quickly create reports to demonstrate IT compliance during audits. This makes it easier to demonstrate HIPAA compliance and show that endpoint controls are in place.
Ready to get automated patching, real-time monitoring, and compliance reporting in a single, user-friendly console? Get started with a free trial of Splashtop AEM today.
