Balancing Simplicity With the Exploding Challenges of Medical Device Security

The following is a guest post by Gus Malezis, President and CEO of Imprivata. The digitization of healthcare has allowed healthcare organizations to utilize robust technology such as network-connected medical devices to help improve both patient care and provider experience across the entire care continuum. Within this Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), medical devices can track and monitor patient stats, provide diagnostic information, help ensure lifesaving care delivery, and even make recommendations on treatment and clinical decision support – all while communicating directly with healthcare IT systems to ensure more complete and accurate patient medical records. With these benefits of digitally connected medical devices, however, we now must consider and address a series of issues that are introduced with network connectivity and automated data integration; issues that relate to patient health and safety, cybersecurity, and compliance. Simply put, advanced network-connected technology opens these devices to the risk of exploitation and compromised patient safety from both internal and external threats. Whether it’s an uninformed patient making changes to an unlocked infusion pump, someone stealing valuable protected health information (PHI) stored on an unattended device, or a cybercriminal using a network-connected medical device to gain backdoor access to a hospital’s entire network or disable the function of the devices (for the purpose of extracting ransomware)...
Source: EMR and HIPAA - Category: Information Technology Authors: Tags: Healthcare IT Security HIPAA Medical Devices connected medical devices Cybersecurity Gus Malezis Healthcare Workflow Imprivata IoMT IoT Medical Device Security Source Type: blogs