When hospitals are hit by cyberattacks that compromise crucial technology systems for managing patient care, the stakes are staggering. Health Brief is a coproduction of The Washington Post and KFF Health News. “We’ve started to think about these as public health issues and disasters on the scale of earthquakes or hurricanes,” said , a co-director of the at the .
Many hospitals are unprepared for long outages, cybersecurity experts say. And the federal government has offered little in the way of required protocols or standards to protect patient safety in attacks on the health sector, which have risen precipitously in recent years. Long-held concerns about protecting patients’ sensitive health information have been overtaken by fears of harm to patients themselves.
and I dug into one of the latest and biggest examples for the news organization and KFF Health News: the that for weeks locked clinicians out of electronic health records, medication systems and other technology at one of the nation’s largest health systems. Clinicians working for Ascension hospitals in multiple states described harrowing lapses, including delayed or lost lab results, medication errors, and an absence of routine safety checks to prevent potentially fatal mistakes. The federal government requires hospitals to protect patient data, according to cybersecurity experts.
Yet there are no requirements for hospitals to have basic cybersecurity protocols in place, which could include things like m.
