An alliance of healthcare companies along with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) yesterday announced the establishment of the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) Cybersecurity Incident Response and Coordination Center to protect the healthcare industry in the United States from attacks.
HITRUST said the center will provide actionable information and alerts on cyber security threats in the areas of networks, mobile devices, work stations, servers and medical devices. Initially, the center is working with 14 organizations representing health plans and health systems, and with HHS, on early threat detection, alerting, remediation and notification to organizations capable of consuming more technical alerting information.
“As the healthcare industry continues its conversion process to full patient electronic medical records, it will most certainly become a more frequent target of cyber security attacks, and having such a system in place in the near future will be key to collaboratively responding to and preventing such attacks,” Jorge DeCesare, chief data security administrator for Dignity Health, said in a statement.