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Selecting an effective risk management solution

by Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | April 02, 2021
Cyber Security
From the April 2021 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Priyanka Upendra
“One of the things I recommend is to discuss a detailed implementation plan or project plan with the vendor before you sign a contract because that is where you have the most opportunity to leverage what you want out of that partnership,” said Priyanka Upendra, quality and compliance director at Banner Health.

That plan should include where you want to install the solution, the deployment model and the cost. When it’s time for implementation, Upendra recommends a multiphase approach, because it allows for the continuous evaluation of important success factors.

She stated that an effective solution identifies the different medical devices, builds a risk profile around them, consolidates all that data to provide meaningful information, detects anomalies and unauthorized behavior happening on your network, communicates risk recommendations to the stakeholders and enforces policies in your risk mitigation plan.

“From a health system side, one of the suggestions I provide is that you want to plan your processes before you implement a solution, otherwise you’re going to end up with a multimillion dollar, fancy solution that’s giving you huge amounts of data sets, but you don’t know how to use it,” said Upendra.

She also recommends implementing different solutions at pilot sites and assessing the data to determine which solution meets your program and organization’s long-term goals. That will help you determine whether what the vendor is showing in the scripted demonstration is what is truly going to happen.

Shankar Somasundaram, CEO and founder of Asimily, concluded the session by outlining how data from the risk management solution can be used to improve the security posture of the health system.

“What people forget is that medical devices risk management is really about vulnerability management,” he explained. “The challenge with medical devices is that not all devices have the same risk.”

Even across devices with the same legacy operating system, the risks may be different. Whether an unpatched vulnerability affects a device depends on the exploitability of the vulnerability for the device in that environment, the impact of the vulnerability, how the device is connected, the device’s security capabilities and any other mitigating security controls.

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