ORLANDO — Getting reluctant doctors on board with a healthcare system’s cybersecurity practices is simple: pay them to educate their peers on why cybersecurity is important, Joseph Schenider, MD, MBA, said here Wednesday.
“We clinicians tend to undervalue cyber-risk protection,” said Schneider, who is a pediatrician at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “Why do we do that? … One [reason] is that we value patient safety and value efficiency, and we see cybersecurity as a roadblock to those, rather than an integral part of that.” Schneider spoke at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) annual meeting
In general, healthcare is viewed as a relatively insecure industry, said Axel Wirth, a distinguished technical architect with the Symantec Corporation in Boston. “We know that about three-quarters of all hospitals spend less than 6% of their information technology budget on security,” while more “security mature” industries spend about 10% to 12%, he said; however, many hospitals have recently been reporting increases in their budgets for this item.
Axel Wirth,…
