Managed IT Solutions for Healthcare
The most diverse business segments are changing and adopting trends that provide the necessary support for recurring tasks to enter the Digital Era. The healthcare sector is no different; technologies are being implemented in the most modern clinical centers.
These innovations can be implemented in hospitals, laboratories, and clinics and act from care to delivery. Combined, the technologies ensure the entire innovation ecosystem works, enabling the transformation of patients, physicians, providers, and hospitals and clinics as a whole.
The IT solutions are offered to support the transformation and automation of repetitive processes, administration and decision support, supply management and control, and billing and purchasing processes. In addition to the hospital environment's power, they offer solutions that, combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning, for example, support physicians in the treatment of patients. These solutions support physicians in diagnosing, data-driven diagnosis, predicting complications, and reducing hospital risk cases.
How IT can help the healthcare sector
While many healthcare organizations worldwide are well prepared and take advantage of the latest technologies, most still have infrastructures that were not designed to support sudden, urgent, high-level projects.
Whether it is a study to obtain generic information or specific research on a particular pathology, what is certain is that the basis for its execution will include the use of vast amounts of data. And this requires, not surprisingly, a rethinking of the technological infrastructure on which they must reside. Take, for example, the imaging tests that are performed every day using MRI scanners: as innovation advances in terms of the power of the devices, so does the resolution, and therefore the capacity of the model detection software must improve, which in turn will increase the demand on the IT infrastructure.
Now, add to this the other image management tools that have evolved in recent years, the images and reports that are collected daily on each patient, and we have before us a considerable challenge: ever-growing volumes of data, in a situation that is not abating but growing.
Medical centers interested in collaborating at the highest level must bear in mind that the study of innovative therapies will require access to large volumes of data and that excessive slowness in accessing this information can have a negative impact in an industry where those who are fastest are the first to reach the finish line and reap the benefits.
Changing access to information infrastructures
From all that has been said so far, it can be concluded that there is an apparent mismatch between the processes used by many of today's healthcare organizations and the requirements needed for an infrastructure to be able to support the scale of innovation required. Medical research institutes that understand this are already adjusting to make faster research progress through large-scale computational and analytical processes—the key to all these processes: the immediate availability of data.
On the other hand, with 'traditional' models, healthcare facilities will have to deal with these infrastructures' financing, which is especially relevant in public healthcare. Therefore, the typical option is self-financing, with the center assuming the costs and risks of the infrastructure, which is not easy. Another option is to work with specialized partners who can carry this risk, who know the requirements and who know how to produce suitable solutions, without the need for the healthcare center to pay in advance, but who can do so on a deferred basis, either 'on-demand' or through 'pay-per-use' formulas for a simple monthly fee.
These pay-as-you-go models, which have been around for years, should form the basis of all such collaborations within the healthcare sector to allow a new, more responsive, and innovative era to emerge and take hold. With the new Capacity on Demand (COD) models, the infrastructure can grow in seconds to allow any service to be initiated and the customer to pay as they scale. In this way, the organization's agility is not limited by the data infrastructure.
Imagine a hospital with this kind of infrastructure that wants to contribute to COVID-19 research. Imagine its ability to accelerate these research processes, using its IT infrastructure 365 days a year to help create the next generation of drugs and vaccines capable of mitigating this pandemic and stopping those that may come in the future.
Cyber security in the healthcare sector
How can we protect them? The medical sector cannot be treated as a traditional IT system, nor does it respond to industrial OT environments' cybersecurity scheme. Its peculiarities make it closer to the Internet of Things (IoT) systems. These environments must incorporate security solutions specific to IoT devices. In ITS Security by Ibermática, we have experience and straightforward solutions to ensure cybersecurity in these environments, through:
Network traffic monitoring and device usage, through monitoring, alerting, and threat response solutions, such as our Nuklea360 solution.
Access management. Most medical robots have touch screens for control by the medical team. Therefore, it is necessary to avoid any possible human error and that someone from the medical team that manipulates the robot can access and modify its configuration by mistake, clearly separating them. Other options are to incorporate additional security factors such as using RFID cards by the medical team to unlock the device.
Performing technical audits of the robot and its control applications using offensive techniques to identify possible vulnerabilities and weak points in the system, supported by specific vulnerability analysis performance.
IT/OT network segmentation and protection of the IoT environment perimeter network prevent threats from spreading through the web and affecting the device.
Protection of unsecured communications through the use of specific encryption elements.
Use of next-generation protocols, such as ZigBee or protocols based on the IEC 802.15.4 standard, which allows different security levels to be applied to the messages sent.
Faced with an increasingly challenging scenario in terms of cybersecurity, the best way to be resilient to cyber-attacks is to generate our Cybersecurity Strategy, which allows us to efficiently and effectively manage technological resources for the prevention, identification, response, and recovery from cyberattacks that seek to jeopardize the operation of critical business processes.
