PROTECTING HEALTHCARE FINANCIAL RECORDS AND DIGITAL PAYMENT ECOSYSTEMS

Abstract

The convergence of healthcare and digital payment systems has created complex ecosystems that handle sensitive financial records alongside clinical data, exposing them to a wide spectrum of security threats. Healthcare financial records contain billing information, insurance claims, and payment credentials, making them highly attractive targets for cybercriminals. This paper proposes a layered security framework for protecting healthcare financial records and digital payment ecosystems against fraud, unauthorised access, and data breaches. The framework integrates strong identity controls, encryption across data lifecycles, machine learning-based fraud detection, and continuous compliance monitoring within a unified architecture. Empirical evaluation was conducted on a simulated healthcare payment environment that processed insurance claims, patient payments, and provider reimbursements, with realistic attack scenarios including claim manipulation, identity fraud, payment redirection, and data exfiltration. Results show that the proposed framework achieved a fraud detection rate of 95.2 percent with a false positive rate of 2.4 percent, while reducing the mean time to detection from forty-five minutes to under three minutes compared with a conventional baseline. Compliance audit completeness reached 97.8 percent across the evaluated regulatory dimensions. The findings demonstrate that protecting healthcare financial ecosystems requires integrated technical, operational, and governance controls operating as a coherent system rather than disconnected point defences.