Hospitals to medtech: Clean up your cybersecurity act

[Image courtesy of Blogtrepreneur on Flickr, per Creative Commons 2.0 license]A consortium of hospital associations wants the medical device industry to up its game when it comes to interoperability and data sharing, especially concerning cybersecurity. The group issued a report this month to make recommendations for all stakeholders in the U.S. hospital care system, including providers, patients, physicians, insurers and industry. The Jan. 18 report, “Sharing Data, Saving Lives: The Hospital Agenda for Interoperability,” in part urged medtech makers to clean up their act regarding the security of patient data in the Internet era. “Medical device manufacturers must do more to confront the privacy challenges that unsecurable devices may pose to hospitals and health systems,” the authors wrote. “Hospitals and health systems, clinicians and patients must be able to trust that the data being shared is accurate, secure and being used in accordance with best practices and patient expectations. Security and privacy requirements must be embedded into every layer of the infrastructure. This includes mechanisms to validate the practices and standards of third-party apps and APIs that allow more flexible sharing of data. The infrastructure also must include a mechanism for health care providers to verify that a request for information is authorized, and each entity with access to individuals’ data must be responsible for appropriately securing and using t...
Source: Mass Device - Category: Medical Devices Authors: Tags: Featured Health Information Technology Software / IT Cybersecurity Source Type: news