The HCI Group’s Vice President of Innovation and Technology, John McDaniel discusses the cybersecurity threats facing the healthcare industry.
Transcript:
Cybersecurity obviously is a huge initiative that is being undertaken in the United States. The challenge within healthcare, and why I think healthcare will be targeted, is if you look at the value of some hacker gaining access to your social security number, the black market value for that might be 50 cents or a dollar—same thing with your credit card number, it might be 50 cents or a dollar. There has been research conducted that says the value of your electronic medical record to the hacker for resell purposes is in excess of $50. Obviously, if you’re a hacker, you’re going to target this industry, which makes the industry’s challenge super-complex from the standpoint of “How do, one, I understand that that’s going to happen and how do I commit the kind of dollars that are required to ensure that we secure that information? And, secondly, how do I change the process around how we detect or mediate and change process going forward?”
The challenge to the industry—the numbers I’ve seen are in the billions of dollars of risk associated with that— are from all kinds of legislative legal kind of issues that will force the industry to really spend more time focusing on it, making it a very high priority strategy. When I talk to CIOs in the industry today and ask, “What are your top three challenges?” cybersecurity is one, two or three. It is always in the top three. So, that tells me that we’re starting to focus on it. Yet, the industry doesn’t have all the answers, nor have they committed the significant amounts of money that are going to be required to implement cybersecurity technologies.
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Additional Articles by John McDaniel:
- Healthcare 2025: Improving care by embracing risk and accepting change
- 5 Steps to Harness Healthcare Innovation
John McDaniel has more than 35 years of experience as a healthcare CIO, consulting services executive and as an executive with large healthcare solution companies. He is vice president of innovation and technology solutions for The HCI Group, the Global Leader in Healthcare IT Consulting.