At the end of March, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services discussed its plans to create a centralized resource to help improve cybersecurity coordination for healthcare.
These plans come amid the fallout from the Change Healthcare cyberattack that rocked the industry when it was announced in February. An American Hospital Association survey conducted in early March found that 94 percent of responding hospitals saw a financial impact from the incident. U.S. government officials have ramped up scrutiny of the industry’s cybersecurity practices in recent weeks.
“Organizations need to operate under the assumption that they’ll be breached at one point or another,” Buck Bell, who leads CDW’s Global Security Strategy Office, said as part of recent CDW research with IT leaders. “In a sense, that’s the entire basis of the zero-trust push that we’ve been seeing over the past couple of years, the idea that you may have already been compromised.”
At this point, there is still more to learn from this serious, wide-reaching cyberattack. It was certainly top of mind when healthcare leaders met in March for the 2024 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society global conference and exhibition in Orlando, Fla.
It was a reminder that cybersecurity, and cyber resilience, remain priorities for healthcare organizations. As Hackensack Meridian Health CISO Mark Johnson said during his HIMSS24 presentation, “If you’re standing still in cyber, you’re getting left behind.”
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