Title: Seeing cyber security and data protection to the lens of health care organisations

Biography:

Christine Ng (Ng Paik Bin) was trained in general nursing at National University Hospital (1992) and graduated from USQ, Australia with Bachelor’s of Nursing (2001) and has recently completed Diploma In Law with London School of Business and Finance (2019). She has strong interests and demonstrated key competencies in Clinical and Biomedical Research Management. She is a member with International Association of Privacy Professionals.

Abstract

8% Year-On-Year Cyber Spend –
Source - Ensign, 2019

32,000 intrusion cyber attacks per day per organisation – Healthcare industry

14,300 per organisation – Other industries
Source - Forti Guard Labs, 2017

The connectivity of network systems have benefited both the users and the hackers, but with very different and obvious outcomes.

Amidst medical and scientific breakthroughs and continuous efforts to enhance quality, targeted treatment and speed in patient care delivery and recovery assisted by the ever changing technological landscapes, both public and private healthcare organisations have been keeping up with the trends and invested in medical devices that provide seamless connectivity between the patients and the hospitals in terms of data transfer and management.

Stolen and sold patient data is disastrous and may be remedied with penalty charges due to breach of privacy and data protection laws.

We must not forget that with inter-governmental and regional MOUs, Trade Agreements and Collaborations being forged at global level, transnational data transfers would be inevitable and will certainly pose higher level of security threats.

Failure of operational network systems arising from cyber attacks within a healthcare organisation with IoMTs (Internet of Medical Things) installed for the purposes stated above carry far reaching damages leading to delayed treatment, disrupted treatment codes and computations, medicinal dosages or simply a mixed up of a patient’s data with another in the aftermath of an attack, could have devastating if not deadly effects.

How do we then enhance patient data protection and strengthen network system security, moving forward?

In my opinion, all healthcare organisations might want to revisit traditional way of patient record keeping in paper, compact discs as back up plans and to prevent data theft and work with the manufacturer to segmentalise/decentralise all IoMTs from the main network systems which is the only path through which the cyber hackers conduct criminal acts. If we need the manpower to man all these traditional activities, so be it, as the long term effects are more sustainable.