Cyber security incidents in any environment can have serious and devastating consequences. They have an impact on many areas: service interruptions, operational losses, patient safety issues, reputational losses, privacy breaches, potential civil actions or class action lawsuits, regulatory investigations/fines and financial losses.
Health care is one of the most critical functions in our society yet, when it comes to our security infrastructure around technology and information protection, we lag far behind many other key industries such as financial services, oil and gas and transportation.
We are increasingly living in a digital age of healthcare. Recognizing the vital role critical IT systems now play in patient, client and resident care, we are slowly evolving from a focus on simply protecting patient data to the broader goal of protecting the ability to provide health services.
Unfortunately, even security infrastructure built with state-of-the-art technology is not enough to protect an organization in the current environment. Cyber security is now much more than an IT function. Organizations increasingly recognize the need to treat cyber security as a core component of their broader organizational strategy.
A trick played on a single employee can pose a greater threat to a healthcare organization than a team of skillful hackers. There are many factors that go into managing cyber threats and the most important one is resilience. Resilience can only be achieved through building organization-wide cyber intelligence, expertise, partnerships and a culture of security along with appropriate information technology solutions.