5 Methods to Enhance Your Safety Posture in Healthcare

Cybersecurity stays high of thoughts for healthcare, as it’s the most focused business, incurring the very best common value of a breach ($9.2M), with the slowest incidence response time (287 days).1

As a healthcare neighborhood, we’ve got confronted new challenges over the past twenty-four months. Whereas the pandemic has created many new hurdles for the healthcare sector, it additionally turned the catalyst for healthcare innovation and transformation and has accelerated change.

Examples of this variation embrace:

  • Hybrid and distant work are actually commonplace
  • Adoption of digital care and telehealth are widespread
  • Acceleration of IoT and distant affected person monitoring
  • Elevated digitization of healthcare
  • Heightened give attention to digital affected person experiences

With change comes new safety necessities

Healthcare is evolving into a brand new period the place almost every part is related by digital applied sciences that enhance the best way healthcare is delivered to sufferers. The way forward for healthcare is being pushed by digital transformation that evolves our supplier care supply fashions, with a heightened give attention to open-standards interoperability. This ongoing digitization will proceed to raise and introduce new safety dangers because the risk panorama turns into extra complicated.

Well being programs and hospitals proceed to judge and implement new fashions for care supply past the hospital partitions, equivalent to distant clinics, ambulatory surgical procedure facilities, and residential well being. The digital platforms connecting these places could also be regional, nationwide, or worldwide. Whereas this connectivity creates nice alternatives for transformation, it additionally creates broader assault surfaces for financially motivated risk actors.

Healthcare has skilled an ever-increasing frequency and severity of cyber safety breaches. Cyberattacks in healthcare greater than doubled in 2020, with ransomware accounting for 28% of all assaults. It’s simple to see why the data-rich healthcare business is a goal for unhealthy actors.2

Cybersecurity breaches for healthcare organizations and sufferers contain the theft of protected well being info (PHI), personally identifiable info (PII), ransomware assaults, and the potential to hack and management medical units. Breaches may end up in longer affected person stays, delays in procedures, and diversions to different amenities.

Medical gadget safety can also be a priority for healthcare suppliers as unhealthy actors take intention at susceptible unpatched programs and improperly configured units. The variety of related medical units can characterize as much as three-quarters (74%) of the units on a healthcare supply group’s community.2

The proliferation of good and related medical units will solely proceed sooner or later. Between 2020 and 2028, the good medical units market is projected to develop by 20.1% CAGR.3

To complicate the panorama additional, healthcare organizations should think about requirements and regulatory necessities equivalent to these discovered with HIPAA, ISO, NIST, GDPR, and PCI DSS. To guard crucial affected person information and medical programs, many healthcare IT leaders have not too long ago adopted the Zero Belief safety framework to bolster cybersecurity defenses. Whereas it’s each a technique and an architectural mannequin, organizations want to acknowledge that it’s also a journey.

Cisco defines Zero Belief as a complete strategy to securing all entry throughout a corporation’s functions and setting, from any consumer, gadget, and placement. It protects the workforce, workloads, and office.

5 methods to enhance safety posture in 2022

In abstract, the overarching mission for CISOs and their safety groups is to guard their establishments whereas sustaining enterprise continuity.

Listed below are 5 ways in which healthcare organizations can enhance their safety posture this 12 months:

  1. Deploy endpoint and malware safety for units and customers
  2. Automate IT and safety duties to scale back risk dangers
  3. Undertake a zero-trust safety framework to assist stop unauthorized entry
  4. Take a look at incident response plans, conduct common danger assessments and desk tops with enterprise alignment
  5. Leverage risk intelligence instruments to proactively determine, mitigate, and remediate safety threats

Because the world’s largest supplier of networking, collaboration, and safety applied sciences, Cisco is dedicated to addressing the safety challenges of the healthcare business. We encourage you to discover our cybersecurity options for healthcare in higher depth in our portfolio explorer instrument.

 


Sources

1 Fashionable Healthcare, Scripps Well being cyberattack value the corporate $113 M, August 11, 2021
2 The Forrester New Wave: Linked Medical Machine Safety Q2 2020, June 1, 2020
3 Information Bridge Market Analysis: Sensible Medical Gadgets Market 20.1% of CAGR by 2021

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