This blog was written by an independent guest blogger.

Digital transformation puts all industries at greater risk of cyber attacks, and the healthcare industry is no exception. As US healthcare organizations increase their reliance on health information technology for purposes such as data sharing, process automation, and system interoperability, their attack surface expands rapidly. This rapidly multiplying number of attack vectors increases cybersecurity risk considerably.

As healthcare organizations digitally transform themselves to better serve a post-pandemic world, the prevailing goal in the past year has been for them to safely extend health services beyond clinical walls. Be it to power everything from pop-up clinics to telemedicine, this is driving the healthcare technology stack out to the edge.

The adoption of cloud services is steadily rising across the healthcare industry as organizations push for better access to medical data. For a leading university hospital system, the move to the cloud helped make terabytes of protected health information (PHI) accessible to their more than 40,000 employees, from medical practitioners to field researchers.

The combination of poor cybersecurity practices, sensitive data storage, and a desperation to preserve business continuity at all costs, makes the healthcare industry a prime target for cybercriminals - an inevitability that was further exacerbated by the pandemic. To support the relevance of healthcare cybersecurity programs within the current cyberattack climate, the 4 biggest cybersecurity challenges in the healthcare industry are listed below.

Picture this. You’re an administrator in charge of providing basic amenities and day-to-day needs across 1,000 beds in an urban multispecialty hospital. One fine morning, you notice that all the patients’ bedside monitoring systems (the computer-like devices that display patient vitals like heartbeat and blood pressure) have stopped functioning, leaving doctors and nurses in the dark.

The healthcare industry faces a plethora of serious cybersecurity risks. Indeed, 2021 saw a record number of major health data breaches in the U.S. — the breach notification portal of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lists at least 713 incidents affecting 45.7 million individuals.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) requires healthcare entities to implement policies and procedures to safeguard the privacy and security of the protected health information (PHI) of patients. One core requirement is to perform risk assessments. This article explains what a risk assessment is according to HIPAA and offers guidance about the steps involved.