More than 500 hospitals are taking part in the Medical Device Information Sharing and Analysis Initiative, an effort to crowdsource granular data on medical devices to improve security for all.
The Medical Device Innovation Safety and Security Consortium is working closely on the project with the National Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the ISAC for the healthcare industry.
Healthcare organizations are struggling to keep track of all the diverse medical devices in use, especially amid the proliferation of mergers and acquisitions that bring in yet more often legacy devices, Dale Nordenberg, M.D., the consortium’s executive director, says in an interview with HealthcareInfoSecurity.com.
This digital ecosystem requires a level of management and tools that don’t yet exist in most healthcare systems, he says.
"The ability to create high-quality inventories [that include] granular data about each device and the characteristics inherent in the device--and the way they connect to the network--is a very big challenge," he says.
The sheer number of devices makes such an effort daunting for individual hospitals, as well as the difficulty in gaining this information from manufacturers.
"The tools that we've built allow crowdsourcing so one healthcare system can do an assessment, collect detailed information about the device, [such as] the ports it requires, different kinds of communication protocols it can leverage, [and] whether or not the device can do encryption," he says.
The aim is to accelerate the availability of that information throughout the industry, he adds.
To learn more:
- here's the interview