Myers says health systems must start protecting their organizations today against the potential cyber threats of tomorrow.

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Bold Statements

“I wanted to make sure that whoever we brought in had tremendous cybersecurity experience, a very proactive risk management mindset, and was a business leader as well, not just a technology leader. It was important that they could speak appropriately to our business stakeholders and partners, communicate the importance of cybersecurity and make sure that cybersecurity is not seen as an impediment to the business.”

“… there are some areas that shouldn’t move to the cloud. So a great example would be our supercomputing infrastructure. We’re not going to move that to the cloud anytime soon, probably not even in the next five years, that’s going to remain on-premise.”

“I think that, for certain projects, it’s great when people can meet on site and really work together to solve a problem. Sometimes it’s difficult on Zoom to get that traction, but overall my philosophy is for a flexible working environment, and I think that’s here to stay.”

Anthony: Welcome to healthsystemCIO’s interview with Kristin Myers, executive vice president and chief information officer with Mount Sinai Health System and dean of digital and technology. I’m Anthony Guerra, founder and editor-in-chief. Kristin, thanks for joining me.

Kristin: Thanks, Anthony, for having me.

Anthony: Very good. You want to start off, tell us a little bit about your organization and your role.

Kristin: Mount Sinai Health System was created from a merger of Mount Sinai Medical Center and Continuum Health Partners in 2013. It comprises eight hospital campuses in the New York metro area and also the Icahn School of Medicine. So around $9.3 billion in revenue and we have 43,000 employees. My role is chief information officer and dean of digital and technology. I am continually looking at optimizing and modernizing and really innovating so that we can enable the health system’s mission and also increase our competitive advantage in the marketplace. I’ve got a wide scope of responsibilities that really span digital enablements, cybersecurity, enterprise data and analytics, innovation, informatics, service delivery, applications, the cloud infrastructure, and also the IT program management office. So anything technology-related falls into my purview.

Anthony: Very good. Excellent. Well, what caught my eye was a press release that went out. It had some very interesting topics in it. It has to do with a company called Sandbox AQ. It’s a collaboration you’re launching around post-quantum cryptography solutions. I was kind of blown away by that. I hadn’t seen a lot of things come out around that, that kind of topic, so I wanted to jump on the phone with you. If you want to start out by describing the issue that this is working to solve, that would be great.

Kristin: So if you think about the amount of confidential information that health systems have – such as PHI and financial information that’s protected today with traditional encryption methods – they can be broken very quickly as quantum computing develops. So really in theory, a bad actor can collect encrypted communication streams and then decrypt them when they have this technology. That would be pretty harmful for health systems around information like PHI or a social security number. So the whole idea around this post quantum cryptography is really around ...