Changing Healthcare Delivery Requires Evolving Security Strategies

From value-based care (VBC) and emergency rooms (ERs) to electronic health records (EHRs), there’s no shortage of initialisms in the healthcare alphabet soup. The one that’s bubbled to the top, however, is IoMT. 

The breadth of the internet of medical things (IoMT) offers huge promise when it comes to a connected infrastructure of medical systems and services.

For the growing number of chronic care management programs (and the at-home models and payment structures that support them), IoMT can help enhance patient outcomes and experiences. Remote monitoring tools provide between-visit support for preventive care, giving physicians continuous access to patient data, and real-time alerts when the data indicates that patients are at risk. 

Smart inhalers connected to apps on the phones of patients with asthma can monitor medication plans and provide alerts to patients while sending prescription monitoring reports to providers. Patient registration and intake apps offer consumer-grade experiences from the comfort of one’s own couch, not a crowded waiting room. And even the average hospital room now has an average of 15 to 20 connected medical devices like smart beds, ventilators, and insulin pumps. 

Enhancing efficacy by increasing the uptake of technology, however, has also exponentially increased the number of endpoints — and vulnerabilities — across the healthcare ecosystem.

The number of ransomware attacks on large medical systems continues to climb, especially the number of breaches introduced by the third-party vendors used by hospitals. And we don’t likely know the full scope of current or potential weaknesses in the healthcare ecosystem because of the minimum threshold for reporting breaches of unsecured protected health information (a minimum of 500, as required by the HITECH Act). 

Regardless of an organization’s size, the potential reputational and operational damages from downtime and canceled procedures caused by patient data breaches are vast. The long and short of a solid cybersecurity posture is that what healthcare organizations don’t know can be as powerful as what they do know. 

It’s vital to employ a security solution like microsegmentation both to contain a breach, so it causes the least amount of damage, and to increase visibility across the organization. 

Healthcare accessibility comes in many forms. Virtual care and other innovations have opened the digital examination room for patients in rural areas to have access to specialists. And patients who are resource-challenged can often avoid taking time off from work by having a telehealth visit instead of an in-person office visit. 

And then there are other models, like subscription-based direct primary care; many providers involved in such “concierge medicine” organizations make house calls and the patient’s living room is now the exam room. 

Other models, like urgent care centers and ambulatory surgery centers, give patients more access to care and the ability to avoid more expensive hospital settings. All those modalities have become more popular since the COVID-19 pandemic began and have redefined the conversation around deliverability and profitability. 

But all these care delivery models require enhanced access to patients’ medical histories and charts, along with the option to share data with other providers and other organizations.

The shift to encourage patients to engage with their providers online necessitates low-latency, continuous uptime and optimized media delivery (for X-rays and 3D renderings, for instance). Physicians who visit patients’ homes as part of concierge practices need access to historical data in real time, and many of them will have opted for a SaaS-based electronic health records system. 

The same goes for those who practice in ambulatory surgery centers, which may not be directly connected to a hospital’s network. Caregivers in urgent care centers need just as much access to patient information about preexisting conditions and allergies, for example, as do those working in traditional in-hospital settings.

Until recently, most of the conversation around data portability was centered on the patient. Broadening the scope of that conversation to who is delivering their care (and where) is an important move in the right direction to promote access across the ecosystem and enhanced interoperability. 

Although connecting the dots is easier said than done, creating a roadmap with current and future opportunities and capabilities offers the chance for greater financial and clinical success. Leveraging healthcare data responsibly and securely while scaling up storage and computing resources with a longitudinal cloud strategy is the best way to promote positive long-term patient — and ecosystem — outcomes.