Leveraging IoT in Healthcare

By CIOReview | Thursday, February 22, 2018

Leveraging IoT in healthcare enables physicians to monitor patients more closely and utilize generated data for analytics. With ease come hardships, IoT in healthcare can also be risky at times even to an extent where patient’s safety and health is put under threat, loss of PHI and hackings. Along with this, it is necessary for the IT professionals to address the risk generated by the increased flow of information.

"There are so many benefits that come with these new connected devices," says Mike Nelson, vice president of healthcare solutions, DigiCert, a security certification company in Lehi, Utah. "But they also present some new risks and vulnerabilities that as an industry we haven't, I would say, firmly dealt with to this point."

Security Risks

With regards to cyber security, BYOD is affecting the privacy and making it difficult to evaluate the life cycle management of the devices and spot the Operating System. Additionally, devices enter through different processes having no common control surrounding them.

The healthcare industry has accepted the IoT’s entry in spite of all the risks and started to prepare and practice security. Out of all the steps taken by the providers and the manufacturers to exercise safety, basic security hygiene such as authentication tops the priority list. The implication of authentication helps to maintain limited device access and verifies the firmware sent to the device and analyzes communication within devices. Encryption and secure boot conduction can be included to enhance this journey towards security.