IoT in Healthcare: The Risks to Consider

By CIOReview | Thursday, April 26, 2018

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Technology in healthcare space has come a long way. With the introduction of IoT within the space, the prospects of significantly improving situational awareness around the patient and hospital operations are closer than ever. However, with technological dexterity, the looming risks associated with IoT such as cybersecurity breach and unwarranted exposition of critical clinical data poses enormous consequences to human life.

Although the annual spend on IoT in healthcare is expected to reach $117 billion by 2020, the healthcare technology executives would have to reanalyze the security with regards to the vulnerabilities that may arise consequential to these technological developments. Looking at some of these risks of IoT in healthcare, CIOs of healthcare entities are leveraging some of the best practices out there to mitigate them.

Owing to the more vulnerable security demography of the digital world, FDA already has cybersecurity standards in position to deal with the security concerns related to IoT devices. However, the primary responsibility to ensure the security of the patient’s information and critical clinical data befalls on the healthcare providers and a significant amount of these risks can be mitigated through best practices. Some of these best practices are categorized into – device security and back-end systems security. Device security can be determined by the healthcare provider by evaluating to what extent the manufacturer is attending to security concerns. Also while going through the process of selecting the manufacturer, the back-end systems need to be assessed with an eye to security and compliance. Fortunately, the job of analysis and monitoring has become simpler owing the pre-determined standards for such kind of application systems.