Community Contributions

On behalf of our nearly 5,000 member hospitals, health systems and other health care organizations, our clinician partners – including more than 270,000 affiliated physicians, 2 million nurses and other caregivers – and the 43,000 health care leaders who belong to our professional membership groups, the AHA thanks the Subcommittee for the opportunity to testify on, and your interest in, the important issue of cybersecurity threats faced by hospitals, health systems and the health care provider field. Now more than ever, we all realize how vital hospitals are to the nation’s critical infrastructure and how important they are to our communities’ health and safety.

Keeping patients safe during anesthesia care is a multifaceted challenge. The skills and vigilance of the anesthesia professional are necessary, but not sufficient. The ergonomics of the care environment, systems of care, communication between teams and many other factors ultimately impact patient safety. Now, it seems we need to add cybersecurity threats as another dimension to the patient safety battle.

MFA. OTP. FIDO. SMS. PKI. All of these acronyms might have you saying OMG, but they are each important to understand when it comes to managing authentication. It’s an anomaly these days when a major breach happens and compromised authentication systems don’t play a role. Multi Factor Authentication (MFA) is critical to stopping attacks — but as we’ll detail in this paper, not all MFA is the same, and attackers are catching up to some first-generation MFA tools. Health CISOs need to stay ahead of the curve.

 

The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) and the Association for Executives in Healthcare Information Security (AEHIS) welcomes the opportunity to submit comments in response to the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) 2023-2026 National Health Security Strategy (NHSS) Request for Information (RFI) published in the Federal Register on February 14, 2022.

The intersection between cybersecurity and healthcare can sometimes be a complicated gray area for people that don’t know much about this topic. In this episode, we talk with Erik Decker, the Chief Information Security Officer at Intermountain Healthcare, a mastermind leader in cybersecurity in the healthcare field. When it comes to the healthcare sector, Erik reflects on how technology has to keep up with the pace we are now running in, addressing threats around cybersecurity and the relationship between AI and machine learning in this topic.