SOLUTION PROVIDER Q&A Sponsored Content


Securing The Patient Journey The Armis Way


Mohammad Waqas Principal Solutions Architect - Healthcare


Armis


What’s the difference between securing medical devices and the Armis strategy of “Securing the Patient Journey?” When you talk about securing medical devices, you’re really looking at a single dimension. You can say, here’s a CT scanner, I need to understand what vulner- abilities exist on it, I need to secure it. But that’s only one part of the overarching patient journey. Let’s take an example of a patient actually coming to receive care in a hospital; they’re going to park their car, they’re going to come into the hospital through auto- matic doors, they’re going to see digital signage to get them to registration desk or kiosks. Then they get to the operating room (OR) and that’s when they actu- ally get connected to a patient monitor. But there’s also HVAC systems that are regulating the humidity levels and temperatures in the OR. When following this model, there are several examples different types of devices that are non-medical before we even got to a single medical device. And these non-medical devices can impact and negatively impact patient care. If parking gate doesn’t open, there’s a backlog. If that registration kiosk is down, there’s increased wait times. My favorite example is that HVAC system, it’s regu-


lating humidity levels in the operating rooms and if it malfunctions the sterility of the equipment is compro- mised and ultimately the surgery is getting canceled. Securing the patient journey for Armis is looking at the entirety of the patient journey and securing all the dif- ferent devices in a healthcare device ecosystem.


In your experience working for and with healthcare organizations, how have you seen this patient journey evolve over time? It’s phenomenal—the changes that patient care, treatment plans, and journeys have taken over time. I started off with seeing nurses printing out charts and filling those out by hand. But then all of a sudden, you start talking about cloud footprints, you have telemedicine, you have technologies like 5G enabling robotic and remote surgeries. These are all realities. If I look back 10 years ago, before cybersecurity and before technology was really a cornerstone of the


focus of healthcare teams, the moment organizations heard the word “cloud” it was an automatic no. A large number of healthcare organizations are all


upgrading their EMR systems now, before it was, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” But now everybody in the industry is starting to realize there’s better ways to do this. There are increasing requirements and we’re see- ing increasing demands of our healthcare systems, so we need to get better. We’re seeing organizations start- ing to embrace cloud applications. We’re seeing them leveraging smart devices—diabetes departments are going and purchasing smart and wireless glucometers. So really, all this technology change is happening in such a short amount of time that there’s such a massive change in the way healthcare delivery is now delivered.


We hear a lot about the need to innovate patient care. How do we prevent security from being a blocker or the ‘no-police’ to enable this evolution of innovating the patient care journey? Security has the challenge of being a fine line between, “I need to secure my organization, but I can’t be stopping it from achieving its goals.” For example, if I just cut off internet access for the entire hospital, that’s secure but it’s not practical. So, there’s a balance that needs to be struck for the security team. One of the biggest challenges is their workload, with all this innovation comes all the requirements for security teams to get engaged. There’s a lot of change that’s happening and security teams have the chal- lenge of keeping up. Hospitals are challenged with the increased


demand for patient care. For example, an organization may have to purchase new devices to keep up with growing demand or innovate to find a new way to do things. And the security team has to be involved and a security teams’ review doesn’t simply happen in one day. When you have platforms that are automati- cally assessing things, like detecting a new medical device in your environment, the security teams no longer need to chase people and goes from a reactive state to a proactive one. So, I see automation as a key element for how security teams go from being the “no police” to actually enabling organizations.


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