Healthcare Data Are Remarkably Vulnerable to Hacking: Connected Healthcare Delivery Increases the Risks

Healthcare data are attractive to cyber-criminals because they contain financial and personal data, can be used for blackmail, and most valuable, are ideal for fraudulent billing. They are also remarkably vulnerable to penetration because of the fluid and always-evolving nature of a patient's medical care and because of the number of clinicians, facilities and transactions required to connect patient care across multiple settings. The addition of mobile healthcare devices and connected healthcare delivery systems (e.g., wearables, monitoring devices, cell phone images) makes healthcare data more attractive but also more vulnerable. Wide variations of digital health use patterns complicates design security solutions for each context or clinician. In this paper we propose a set of connected healthcare patterns, and then discuss security challenges and potential solutions for each of the connected health patterns.