In that same vein, healthcare organizations must make a priority of preventative care. You don’t need to be a physician or a heart patient to understand that hopping on the treadmill a few times a week is far easier before undergoing a triple bypass than it is starting an exercise regimen afterwards. The earlier that cybersecurity issues are addressed, the better off a hospital or care network will be. Being proactive – conducting checkups, training staff and implementing appropriate systems – helps organizations sidestep the damage, cost and reputational consequences risked by settling on a reactive approach. Investing in robust cybersecurity systems and adopting methods such as encryption-in-use enable organizations to “shift left,” or otherwise address potential cybersecurity issues in the pipeline before they grow into a problem that can bring an entire operation to a standstill.

The true cost of a failed cybersecurity plan
Every organization that relies on the internet to conduct operations and that collects or stores data should consider itself a potential target for a cybersecurity attack. But it is those organizations that neglect to plan for the threat of a breach and to protect against bad actors that are, by far, the most vulnerable among them.
Which makes the commitment to cybersecurity of healthcare organizations, specifically, exponentially consequential. Given the stakes, ownership and responsibility of healthcare cybersecurity should be considered just as important as healthcare itself. In the event of a healthcare data breach, the potential butterfly effect can be dramatic. Machines may no longer function, charts become unavailable, networks go dark. Patients may needlessly experience pain, suffer exacerbated long-term health complications and even face death. Poor cybersecurity can severely compromise a hospital’s day-to-day operations, backing up schedules, bottlenecking other local care systems, imperiling the public trust and possibly even leading to litigation.

But too many organizations seem to view cybersecurity as something of an afterthought, or a line item that can be squeezed as a cost-cutting measure. For-profit healthcare facilities are run by executives and board members who prioritize revenue. But in some ways, nonprofit hospitals – which outnumber profit-driven facilities by at least twofold – are in a tighter bind. For organizations bound to strict (and often modest) budgets, justifying up-front cybersecurity costs to protect against a breach that arguably may never come can be a difficult sell.

Health IT Homepage