Healthcare Orgs May Be Ramping Up Cybersecurity Efforts

As I’ve noted (too) many times in the past, healthcare organizations don’t have a great track record when it comes to cybersecurity. Compared to other industries, healthcare organizations spend relatively little on IT security overall, and despite harangues from people like myself, this has remained the case for many years. However, a small new survey by HIMSS suggests that the tide may be turning. It’s not incredibly surprising to hear, as health it leaders have been facing increasingly frequent cybersecurity attacks. A case in point: In a recent study by Netwrix Corp., more than half of healthcare organizations reported struggling with malware, and that’s just one of many ongoing cyber security threats. The HIMSS cybersecurity survey, which tallies responses from 126 IT leaders, concluded that security professionals are focusing on medical device security, and that patient safety, data breaches and malware were their top three concerns. In the survey, HIMSS found that 71% of respondents were allocating some of their budgets toward cybersecurity and that 80% said that their organization employed dedicated cybersecurity staff. Meanwhile, 78% of respondents were able to identify a cybersecurity staffing ratio (i.e. the number of cybersecurity specialists versus other employees), and 53% said the ratio was 1:500 which, according to HIMSS is considered the right ratio for information-centric, risk-averse businesses with considerable Internet exposure. Also of note, i...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: EHR Electronic Health Record Electronic Medical Record EMR EMR Security Healthcare Healthcare CIO HealthCare IT HIPAA General CISO Cybersecurity Budget Cybersecurity Staffing Healthcare Data Security HIMSS Netwrix Corp. Source Type: blogs