When hospitals are hit by cyberattacks that compromise crucial technology systems for managing patient care, the stakes are staggering.
“We’ve started to think about these as public health issues and disasters on the scale of earthquakes or hurricanes,” said Jeff Tully, a co-director of the Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity at the University of California at San Diego.
When Denise Anderson, president of the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, began working in the health sector, federal officials were focused mostly on data privacy and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the landmark 1996 patient privacy law.
“We weren’t pairing cybersecurity and health care in the same sentence,” said Anderson, whose organization works to protect the health sector from physical and cyberthreats.
Read the full article in Health Brief by The Washington Post and KFF Health News here:
