“A rapid increase in computerization of health care organizations (HCOs) around the world has raised their profile as lucrative targets for cyber-criminals. Recently there has been a spate of high-profile ransomware attacks involving hospitals’ electronic health record (EHR) data.
These large scale, malicious events compromise the safety of patient data and remind us of the need for a National Health IT Safety Center, a $5 million Fiscal Year 2017 budgetary request of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) that we have supported before. In the absence of a centralized investigation and dissemination clearinghouse for these types of events, it is not possible to decipher specific details of what happened, how the problems were resolved, and what other organizations should learn from these events.”
Read the full article at: healthaffairs.org.
Threats from ransomware have increasingly targeted computers at hospitals. In a Reuters report, it stated that a study from Health Information Trust Alliance on 30 mid-sized U.S. hospitals revealed that over half of these establishments (52%) were infected with the malicious software.
CIO David Chou, a keynote presenter at Corepoint Connect 2015, has written extensively about ransomware on the Health Standards blog.
He also interviewed Chris Bowen, founder and chief privacy & security officer of ClearDATA, in the following video interview. How are you protecting your facility from ransomware?
