Over the past two years, COVID-19 has pushed hospitals and healthcare systems to their breaking points, flooding beds and demanding daily personal sacrifices from critical healthcare workers. Each resurgence has served as a reminder of the critical nature of our healthcare infrastructure – and its need to be consistently resilient.
Although some of COVID-19's worst health outcomes appear to be tapering off, with new cases and patient deaths declining despite legitimate worries over new variants, a long-gestating issue is coming into sharper focus: Burned out from dealing with the never-ending pandemic, healthcare workers and leaders are inadvertently opening the door to a new wave of dangerous cybersecurity threats.
Healthcare under digital threats Improbable though it may have seemed before the pandemic, cybersecurity has emerged as one of the healthcare community's most prominent topics of conversation and concern. As COVID-19 shut down offices across the world, hackers deliberately targeted healthcare systems with ransomware and threats designed to disrupt day-to-day operations. Some hospitals were forced to return to pen-and-paper record keeping; others saw ER-destined patients unnecessarily re-routed to distant locations due to inaccurate information on open beds.
These attacks haven't stopped as the first part of 2021 saw a 62% year-over-year increase, and healthcare leaders continue to struggle with increasing threats and actual attacks affecting patient care. Yet many organizations' IT and security operations have quietly fallen by the wayside, due to the chaos of COVID-era limited resource allocation, coupled with employee burnout as the pandemic's third year looms in the not-too-distant future.
From pandemic pain to endemic shortfalls This is particularly concerning because the teams hired to help mitigate cyberthreats are thinning at an alarming rate during a time when those threats are continuing to rise steadily. There was already a serious shortage of qualified cybersecurity professionals prior to the pandemic, and as team members fell ill or were forced to exit the workforce to care for family members, a domino effect rippled through multiple industries.
Between subsequent population losses and The Great Resignation, understaffing has become the norm rather than the exception inside and outside the healthcare sector. Many front-line workers who remain, including non-medical employees who were required to work in high-risk environments, are either already burned out or on the road to burning out.
