Advanced healthcare data advancements need tighter cybersecurity: analysts

While the digitisation of healthcare data and advancements in healthcare technologies have had boundless benefits, the breakneck speed of innovation is not without its pitfalls.

According to Deloitte global life sciences and health care industry leader, Mitch Morris, these improvements are being accompanied by pervasive and persistent cyber risks that can leave businesses and organisations vulnerable to debilitating losses and reputational damage.

“Provider and payer organisations handling personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI) must continually guard against malicious cyber events which are increasing in frequency and severity,” Morris said.

According to Morris, among the emerging threats that should prompt sector stakeholders to implement enterprise-wide cyber security programs are cloud-based computing attacks, medical device security concerns, and privileged access.

“With the broad migration of software to the cloud (public/hybrid) as a main backup storage platform, the healthcare sector has been exposed to new security challenges from distributed denial of service (DDoS) and related types of cyber attacks,” Morris said.