Hospitals embracing IoT must be prepared to secure a decentralized environment

With the Internet of Things and connected medical devices, poor cybersecurity poses risks to both patient safety and the infrastructure that keeps hospitals running. It’s an ongoing challenge for healthcare security professionals.

What makes it such a challenge is that the hospital environment is a very different beast than it once was. Clinical delivery has moved from a palliative care model to a highly technological model that’s very IoT-centered. It’s convenient because it allows hospitals to stack all kinds of monitors and telemetry systems in patients’ rooms. But it introduces risks, as IoT devices are unable to be managed centrally.

“There are inherent vulnerabilities and risks, and they’re growing at a pretty exponential rate,” Richard Staynings, chief security strategist at Cylera, said at the Healthcare Security Forum in Boston on Tuesday. “The machines are taking over our hospital environment.”

That raises a basic question: How can healthcare deal with this environment?

There’s no easy answer. Saif Abed, director of cybersecurity advisory services at AbedGraham, said the way medicine is being practiced is being forced to change because of how much technology there is in the clinical environment. One manifestation of this is that the newer class of medical students is growing up more technologically dependent, and the industry is still coming to terms with what to do when this dependency is exposed.