AAMI 2017: Keep Pace with Evolving Healthcare Information Security Attacks

If the WannaCry ransomware attack that paralyzed many of the United Kingdom's National Health Service hospitals and clinics and impacted 150 countries is proof of anything, it’s that the healthcare industry continues to play catch-up when it comes to cybersecurity.

University of Michigan Associate Professor Kevin Fu, who is slated to deliver a keynote speech June 11 at the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation 2017 Conference & Expo, believes that hackers, by and large, remain one step ahead of professionals in charge of mitigating such threats.

“The bad guys know the vulnerabilities of devices on clinical networks better than the good guys at the hospitals,” Fu, who also serves as head of the Archimedes Medical Device Security Research Center, says in a recent interview with AAMI. “That’s not fair, and the only way forward is via a solid inventory. You can’t protect what you don’t know you have.”

Medical device security will be one several key themes at the June 9-12 conference in Austin, Texas. In addition to Fu’s address, which will focus on the risks, benefits and regulatory issues that have changed the medical device industry over 165 years, Scot Copeland, a clinical systems specialist with San Diego-based Scripps Health, will share his own experiences with cybersecurity risk management on June 10.

The conference will also focus heavily on the use of data analytics tools. Dr. J. Randall Moorman, a professor of medicine, physiology and biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, will deliver a June 10 keynote focusing on the use of bedside medical devices to predict and prevent deadly diseases. What’s more, in a June 11 education session, attendees will learn how real-time analytics tools are changing the way healthcare organizations manage critical events.

Arleen Thukral, a chief biomedical engineer with the Veterans Affairs Department’s Central California Health Care System, will also lead a discussion on network monitoring for biomed servers, specifically focusing on the health system’s implementation and use of SolarWinds Orion Monitoring.

HealthTech will be on hand to cover those sessions and more. Follow all of our coverage on our AAMI 2017 conference landing page.