Cybersecurity Service Protects Medical Devices from Attacks

A service that combines medical device expertise, artificial intelligence (AI), and process management tools aids hospitals in their fight against cybersecurity threats.

The GE Healthcare (GE, Little Chalfont, United Kingdom) Skeye platform is a security operations center (SOC) designed to augment hospitals’ existing resources and capabilities by providing proactive monitoring and complete medical device security assessment. By helping hospitals detect, analyze, and respond to cybersecurity threats and events in real time, risks and vulnerabilities can be identified, action plans recommended, and remediation advice and execution strategies can be implemented.

GE Healthcare’s Skeye is a vendor-agnostic solution that helps protect any networked medical devices, regardless of age, manufacturer, or operating system. It uses AI-enabled tools together with the SOC to provide 360˚ coverage, starting with risk assessment, and moving onto real-time networked device discovery. Skeye also automates connected device inventory and equipment risk profiling to create a dynamic management system for device onboarding and decommissioning. A SOC team provides continuous monitoring, threat detection, and remediation to hospital connected medical devices under a GE Healthcare service contract.

“Our customers need visibility to see what medical devices are connected to their networks and the right resources to mitigate potential threats. This new offering provides customers with 360˚ threat visibility and a resolution roadmap to help defend and protect against vulnerabilities,” said Matt Silva, chief information security officer at GE Healthcare. “Our security operations center can augment customers’ in-house security teams by addressing cybersecurity events, as well as providing the latest information on malware and other malicious threats.”

“We wanted to stay current with cybersecurity trends, assess the risk across our hospitals and clinics, and analyze our own preparedness. GE Healthcare’s Skeye offering helps us do just that,” said Chad Friend, director of IT at T.J. Regional Health (Glasgow, KY, USA). “As a small hospital group, we don’t have a large IT team. Accessing the global scale, tools and expertise of GE Healthcare gave us a partner to ensure we have a robust cybersecurity process in place and access to the latest information and action plans.”

Security incidents can profoundly impact an organization’s productivity, finances, quality of care and reputation; and as more devices become connected, cybersecurity risk increases. In 2018 alone, 82% of hospital technology experts in the United States reported a significant security incident, with the cost of an average data breach exceeding USD 3.8 million.

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