Sponsored by Medigate

A well-conceived Zero Trust strategy that keeps data and operations safe, by trusting nothing and verifying everything, can generate a lot of security and business benefits. Unfortunately, for healthcare organizations, tightly restricting access to data and devices can be problematic, even dangerous, by inserting security between endpoints and medical devices in a way that disrupts care and affects patient outcomes.
Healthcare Needs Clinical Zero Trust
Access or communications can’t be blocked simply because a device has been moved or powered up. Within healthcare, zero trust can’t be about protecting each device, but rather each care protocol. It’s not about protecting things (e.g. devices), it’s about protecting processes and procedures, which can include any number of people, data and things.
What this means is that security can’t be done in isolation. Clinicians and biomedical engineers, who understand the physical and digital flows associated with administering patient care, must take an active role in setting the strategy. They are the only ones who can provide the context needed to implement an effective Clinical Zero Trust strategy that can protect what matters most for healthcare organizations – patient care.
The Top 5 Benefits of Clinical Zero Trust
A Clinical Zero Trust strategy can ensure cybersecurity is implemented in a way that accounts for the needs of patients and staff, as well as the business, offering:
1. Improved Visibility
The ongoing implementation of a Clinical Zero Trust strategy is predicated on detailed, real-time inventories of all the devices and network communications within the IT environment. Ultimately, this visibility enables security and biomed teams to make better decisions around all a hospital’s assets.
2. Productive Collaboration & Orchestration
Biomed cannot protect the care protocols without security, and vice versa. By implementing a Clinical Zero Trust strategy, both sides of the health system are finally talking the same language and working toward the same goal – protecting patients.
3. Enablement of Value-based Care
Clinical Zero Trust can be an enabler to the delivery of value-based care, helping health systems engineer their care delivery networks to maximize the robustness and agility of their service delivery. New devices and services can be onboarded by security-ready processes to automatically protect the integrity and availability of care.
4. Mitigation of Attacks
A Clinical Zero Trust strategy implements control points that protect the care protocols, making the environment inherently more resilient and impervious to attacks. Those that do get in will be quickly contained and prevented from propagating, which greatly limits an incident’s damage potential. This keeps health systems and patients from the emotional and financial toll that a data breach can take.
5. Increased Efficiencies
In defining the care protocols, hospitals are forced to take a good hard look at what they are doing and how they are operating, leading to the identification of opportunities for improvement and chances to consolidate multiple, disparate systems and controls to streamline operations and reduced management costs.
For more information, please visit www.medigate.io.