As healthcare organizations digitally transform themselves to better serve a post-pandemic world, the prevailing goal in the past year has been for them to safely extend health services beyond clinical walls. Be it to power everything from pop-up clinics to telemedicine, this is driving the healthcare technology stack out to the edge.
The adoption of cloud services is steadily rising across the healthcare industry as organizations push for better access to medical data. For a leading university hospital system, the move to the cloud helped make terabytes of protected health information (PHI) accessible to their more than 40,000 employees, from medical practitioners to field researchers.
The combination of poor cybersecurity practices, sensitive data storage, and a desperation to preserve business continuity at all costs, makes the healthcare industry a prime target for cybercriminals - an inevitability that was further exacerbated by the pandemic. To support the relevance of healthcare cybersecurity programs within the current cyberattack climate, the 4 biggest cybersecurity challenges in the healthcare industry are listed below.
Picture this. You’re an administrator in charge of providing basic amenities and day-to-day needs across 1,000 beds in an urban multispecialty hospital. One fine morning, you notice that all the patients’ bedside monitoring systems (the computer-like devices that display patient vitals like heartbeat and blood pressure) have stopped functioning, leaving doctors and nurses in the dark.
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) requires healthcare entities to implement policies and procedures to safeguard the privacy and security of the protected health information (PHI) of patients. One core requirement is to perform risk assessments. This article explains what a risk assessment is according to HIPAA and offers guidance about the steps involved.
The volume, variety, and velocity of data being collected in clinical trials is constantly increasing. It regularly surpasses what any one person or even a team of people can process, organize and monitor. Companies can no longer throw people at the problem, which is why many have turned to automation and AI to fill the gap.
In October 2021, the IT systems of the Israeli healthcare system suffered a ransomware attack from which it took weeks to recover. Although the motive for the cyberattack on this occasion was not geopolitical but financial, government sources said they feared that far more dangerous incidents against this sector could be carried out by groups linked to foreign powers such as Iran.
