[author: Jane Anderson]
As the COVID-19 pandemic progressed from its urgent beginning to almost a “new normal,” chief information security officers (CISOs) at health systems have been fighting to combat emerging cyberthreats while supporting the sudden shift to telemedicine and working from home. In doing so, the officers said, the experience offers lessons for the path forward.
Five privacy and cybersecurity experts offered their take on the pandemic and what it revealed about the health care industry’s cyber strengths and weaknesses on March 22 at the 30
th annual National HIPAA Summit, which was held virtually.
[1]
“Last March was a pretty big blur,” said Jacki Monson, vice president and chief privacy and information security officer at Sutter Health in northern California. “Literally from one day to the next, we went from having a couple of hundred workforce members working from home to close to 15,000.” This affected security, of course, but it also affected workflow, she said. “Things are different with people working in the office versus at home, and there’s lots of security issues and lots of privacy issues that we had to accommodate.”