Stay updated with the latest healthcare cybersecurity trends, news, and tips to protect patient data and comply with medical industry security standards.
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Background for this topic.
Healthcare is the delivery of clinical care and related services through hospitals, clinics, laboratories, pharmacies, insurers, and connected medical devices. It depends on electronic health records (EHRs), patient identity systems, diagnostic and imaging platforms, medication and scheduling systems, and data exchanges between organizations. These environments hold sensitive health and payment information, while the availability and integrity of systems can affect treatment, diagnostics, and patient safety.
Security concerns include unauthorized access or disclosure of records, alteration of clinical data, and disruption of care through attacks on EHRs, connected devices, or third-party services. Defenses require risk-based access controls, strong authentication, network separation where appropriate, secure device and software maintenance, backups that support clinical continuity, and tested downtime and incident-response procedures. Vulnerability management must account for legacy systems and devices that cannot be patched quickly. Privacy and compliance obligations, such as HIPAA in the United States, shape how organizations collect, use, share, retain, and report health information.
Healthcare organizations of all shapes and sizes will be held to a stricter standard of cybersecurity starting in 2025 with new proposed rules, but not all have the budget for it.
The changes to the healthcare privacy regulation with technical controls such as network segmentation, multi-factor authentication, and encryption. The changes would strengthen cybersecurity protections for electronic health information and address evolving threats against healthcare entities.
Experts: New Mandates Could Be Difficult, Costly for Many EntitiesThe U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' proposed overhaul of the 20-plus-year-old HIPAA Security Rule aims to drastically improve the state of healthcare sector cybersecurity, but the potential new requirements could mean difficult and expensive heavy lifting for many regulated entities.
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The US government has set out proposals to increase security obligations on healthcare providers to protect patient data amid surging cyber-attacks in the sector
The first 100 days of the next Trump administration and new Congress will be critical in showing signs of what's potentially in store for the healthcare sector cybersecurity, privacy and related regulatory and legislative issues in the new year, said Chelsea Arnone and Cassie Ballard of CHIME.
As healthcare entities embrace generative AI tools, it's critical they take a holistic approach addressing privacy and security governance, said Dave Perry, digital workspace operations manager, St. Joseph's Healthcare in Ontario, who discusses how his organization is tackling those challenges.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has proposed updates to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) to secure patients' health data following a surge in massive healthcare data leaks. [...]
Fully homomorphic encryption can safeguard highly sensitive health data related to rare diseases, underserved populations and clinical trials as it is shared with medical researchers, said Kurt Rohloff, co-founder and CTO of Duality Technologies, who said projects to apply it are underway right now.
The United States Department of Health and Human Services' (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has proposed new cybersecurity requirements for healthcare organizations with an aim to safeguard patients' data against potential cyber attacks