The health care sector faces increasing pressure from cyberattacks targeting hospitals and other medical facilities while it deals with old equipment and systems that weren’t designed with cybersecurity in mind, warns a policy paper from the office of Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.
Citing input from health care and cybersecurity experts, the paper outlines the cyberthreats facing health care providers and offers several policy solutions to improve the situation for the industry. Such considerations are timely as cyberattacks on the industry have spiked over the past decade, reaching record levels in 2021.
The paper, titled “Cybersecurity is Patient Safety,” contends that improving the sector’s cybersecurity requires the public and private sectors to collaborate and calls for federal leadership, reinforcing health care providers’ cyber capabilities and creating a robust response system to efficiently recover from attacks.
