The Change Healthcare hack could be a catalyst for real healthcare cybersecurity improvement

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Im­prove­ments need­ed to patch the cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in the health­care sys­tem have been frus­trat­ing­ly slow to come by in the US, even as ran­somware at­tacks es­ca­late and da­ta show re­al pa­tient safe­ty im­pacts.

Gaps in­clude crit­i­cal en­force­ment stan­dards, tech­ni­cal re­sources and fi­nan­cial sup­port. But that might start to change, in part be­cause of some reg­u­la­to­ry mo­men­tum and the Change Health­care hack, which took down the Unit­ed­Health-owned com­pa­ny at the end of Feb­ru­ary.

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