Recently, a new scientific article entitled “Can we learn from an imagined ransomware attack on a hospital at home platform?” has been published on npj Digital Medicine. The authors, members of the CYMEDSEC consortium, are Stephen Gilbert (TUD Dresden University of Technology), Francesco Ricciardi (IRCCS Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza), Tauseef Mehrali (Ada Health GmbH), Constantinos Patsakis (University of Piraeus). The article maps the potential impacts of cyber-attacks at hospital at home (HaH), a new healthcare model proving hospital care at patients’ homes. The impacts are summarized as following:
- patients: health data leak or loss; reduced level of care; potential loss of life
- health professionals: stress of emergency response; health data loss; long term psycological consequences
- company/ies: reputational damage; increased insurance costs; civil damages or criminal negligence proceeding
- society: concerns about health data; loss of credibility of digital health; slower realization of digital health
In the words of Professor Stephen Gilber, coordinator of the CYMEDSEC project “It goes without saying that the cybersecurity of sensors and wearable devices is important where they are used in healthcare, e.g., in monitoring of patients chronic diseases such as diabetes. Across the EU, a new phenomenon is the use of wearable- and sensor-based monitoring approaches to enable the early release from hospital to home of severely ill patients – here a cybersecurity attack could readily cause a major public health incident, a scenario we explore in this paper, where we also describe how this can be prevented.”
CYMEDSEC is a new EU-funded project aiming to enhance cybersecurity for medical devices (MDs) and in vitro diagnostic systems (IVDs) to increase patients’ safety and privacy. The main goal of this project is the implementation of updated security systems on healthcare devices from their inception, the so-called cybersecurity-by-design. Finally, CYMEDSEC wants to propose improvements to current industry standards at the European and international levels.
Read the full article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-024-01044-5
“Tecnomedicina” dedicated an article on this paper (in Italian): https://www.tecnomedicina.it/cymedsec-migliorare-la-sicurezza-informatica-dei-dispositivi-medici/?amp=1