The Healthcare industry is in the midst of rapid technological change. 

As new devices and cloud applications allow providers to make care more flexible, personalized, and data-driven; healthcare organizations are accelerating modernization to improve the quality of care they provide and achieve better patient outcomes. As a result, IT plays an ever-increasing role in the relationship between doctors and their patients. 

As the rate of modernization increases, healthcare organizations’ digital environments are becoming vastly more dynamic and complex, potentially opening the door to cybercrime. In the first nine months of 2023, the medical data of more than 61 million people was exposed across more than 400 attacks, demonstrating the urgency of concerns around patient data privacy and integrity.

With threat actors using increasingly more sophisticated tools and techniques to exploit any vulnerability, security must be an essential part of every digital initiative. How do you increase operational resilience and ensure that the data, devices, and applications your medical teams rely on to care for patients remain secure and available?

Healthcare is Embracing Digital Transformation

Medical devices are now widely connected, offering medical teams unprecedented access to the data they need to make critical care decisions. Electronic medical records (EMRs) deliver patient health information to providers anywhere and everywhere a patient seeks treatment. Digital communication between patients, care providers, hospitals, ambulatory centers, and pharmacies reduces the likelihood of errors and supports the highest quality of care. As each digital initiative makes medical services more effective, it also carries its own set of cyber risks.

Healthcare Organizations are Prime Targets

Because healthcare organizations possess sensitive data, such as protected patient health information (PHI), which carries a high monetary value for cybercriminals, they’re uniquely attractive to threat actors. They also can’t afford downtime since IT plays a critical role in care delivery and patient safety. When a healthcare organization experiences a cyberattack, it has no choice but to protect its data and keep its systems available, regardless of the cost.

Today, cyber criminals are using AI and ML to increase the speed and efficiency of their attacks. Across the industry, the number of ransomware attacks more than doubled between 2016 and 2021 (JAMA Health Forum 2023). In one year, between 2021 and 2022, the industry experienced 525 incidents, with confirmed data disclosure in 436 of the incidents (Verizon 2023 Data Breach Investigations Report).

Beating the Dark Side

Healthcare security teams need a holistic, unified approach to cybersecurity to leverage technology, effectively deliver distributed care, and improve patient outcomes without increasing cyber risk. Rather than relying on multiple tools that require complex, manual integrations, security operations should seamlessly protect your entire IT infrastructure and deliver the tools to manage and control security efficiently.

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