Robotic medical devices, such as surgical gear, offer great potential to improve patient care, but the cyber risks associated with these products must be carefully addressed, said Kevin Fu, director of the Archimedes Center for Health Care and Medical Device Cybersecurity at Northeastern University.

Besides not doing cyberthreat modeling at all, some the biggest mistakes medical device manufacturers can make are starting the modeling process too late in the development phase or using it simply as a "paper weight exercise," said threat modeling expert Adam Shostack of Shostack & Associates.

Healthcare entities can easily achieve many of the cyber performance goals set by regulators if they deploy technology solutions that provide robust security by default and create an organizational culture in which security-mindedness is ingrained, said Taylor Lehmann of Google Cloud.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology's updated Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 can help healthcare organizations better formalize their governance functions to enhance their cybersecurity posture and resilience, said Robert Booker, chief strategy officer at HITRUST.

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The many kinds of OT and IoT gear that are not regulated medical devices but are critical to run hospitals and other care facilities present a variety of cybersecurity and patient safety concerns, said Dr. Benoit Desjardins, professor of radiology at the University of Pennsylvania Medicine.

In the aftermath of a ransomware attack several years ago, Hackensack Meridian Health embarked on transforming its cybersecurity program with the support of top leadership and increased funding and staff and by implementing critical security tools and best practices, said CISO Mark Johnson.

Healthcare organizations and makers of medical devices need to think about how to safeguard their critical medical gear against future cyberthreats, including the looming dangers posed by quantum computing, said Mike Nelson, global vice president of digital trust at security firm DigiCert.

The U.S. healthcare sector needs to closely watch government regulatory and legislative developments involving artificial intelligence, including the European Union AI Act, said Lee Kim, senior principal of cybersecurity and privacy at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

It's critical for hospitals and other firms to not only prepare for how they will respond to a cyberattack but also to consider the regional impact if a neighboring provider of services needed in the community is disrupted by a serious cyber incident, said Margie Zuk of Mitre.