Addressing Heightened IoT Risk in Health Care

As digital health technologies proliferate in 2020, there is newfound hope for monitoring patients remotely and triaging patient care. But there is also heightened IoT security risk.

Written by Sean Suzuki
23rd November 2020

This year has demonstrated the importance of IoT in health care, as remote and digital technologies become critical to triaging patient care and ongoing patient monitoring as well. COVID-19 brought new models of digitized care to the fore. It’s also brought increasing security complexity to the fore in health care IoT.

The IoT in healthcare market is expected to grow from $72.5 billion in 2020 to $188.2 billion in 2025.

And according to Omdia, medical IoT device growth will increase more than tenfold by 2025, “their contribution to the size of the global digital data footprint is expected to increase more than tenfold by 2025.”

With this growth, some risks have heightened, including those to patient data privacy and security, as well as to IoT device integrity.

Seth Fogie, director of IT at Penn Medicine, sat down to discuss IoT risk in health care, as well as some of Penn Medicine’s initiatives to address and improve healthcare challenges and mitigate risks.

Key topics from this discussion include the following:

Examples of IoT security challenges for consumers and enterprises and the kinds of systems used.
Different categories of protocols and security (i.e., web app, mobile device, network security), and the skill sets needed for future IoT security technologies. Fogie discusses how teams can stay abreast of technology changes.
Aligning formal standards, having the right criteria, and efficiently going through a testing process for devices to validate them

To learn more about the different security approaches to IoT, check out our conversation with Fogie below.

And take part in IoT Security Summit this December.