Shield the Patients - Information - Understanding us
To understand what Shield the Patients really is, you'll need to first know the general definition of cybersecurity as well as the healthcare sector/industry. The general defintion of cybersecurity is the protection of data, networks, systems, devices, personal information (and just mostly everything comprising on your devices), from facing online threats, getting exposed, acessed from an unauthorized source, or to be used for malintent. It includes a vast spread of practices and processes used to secure said protections from said threats. The healthcare sector (also known as the healthcare industry), is the collection of businesses, corporations, and more that contribute to the overall healthcare system by providing services, facilities, and resources. The healthcare sector operates inside of and helps the overall larger healthcare system.
Within the actual healthcare sector exists two further sorts of bricks, Health IT and Health Cybersecurity. Health IT refers to systems and technology used to collect, store, and manage health related records and data/information, such as patient data or electronic health records. Healthcare cybersecurity goes in hand with Health IT - it is the protection of these Health IT systems and data from threats, such as data breaches which puts patients' information at risk, or DDoS attacks which overwhelm Health systems networks and block access to things like electronic health records.
Both Health IT and Healthcare cybersecurity depend on each other to successfully function. Health IT needs Healthcare Cybersecurity to protect their services so they can continue storing and managing health information securely, and Health Cybersecurity needs Health IT to even work, since it's all about protecting Health IT. If there is a breach in Healthcare Cybersecurity that only puts Health IT at risk. For example: if a Health IT network is hit with a DDoS attack, the servers get flooded with traffic making health records inaccessible. Without Healthcare Cybersecurity, these records can't be accessed when it's really needed. Health Cybersecurity can prevent this from happening through things like mitigation and redirection of this traffic through set filters or blocking it using firewalls that only allow specific IP addresses and drop suspicious packets. This dependency on each other also causes problems to arise, a poor cybersecurity scene greatly puts Health IT at risk.
Public Health Cybersecurity often gets confused with Healthcare Cybersecurity. While their goals remain the same, Public Health Cybersecurity differs from your standard Healthcare Cybersecurity. It strives to protect the public or community health systems, rather than those of individuals. It focuses on protecting things such as population health data - data of not one specific individual but numerous. The Public Health Cybersecurity scene is far worse than the scene in Healthcare Cybersecurity, due to not enough funding or outdated processes or just due to the fact that there's more to protect, but it isn't as vulnerable or doesn't face nearly as many threats as Healthcare Cybersecurity faces. Due to the importance of patient data, the immense amount of digital systems, as well as a greater reward, Healthcare data tends to be attacked more often than Public Health data, despite the "better" cybersecurity scene. Hundreds of major Healthcare breaches occur every year, but only a handful of Public Health breaches.
The Healthcare Cybersecurity scene is nowhere near as close as the cybersecurity scene in other industries, yet Healthcare still remains the most attacked industry. Big medical corporations, despite their resources and funding, have relatively poor cybersecurity scenes, so imagine how much worse it would be for your local hospital or healthcare business. Local clinics or independent companies sometimes don't even have dedicated teams for cybersecurity or IT, one singular attack, even at a lower level, could completely set them back, and due to not giving enough importance to IT, processes tend to be slower. Getting interested and involved in this growing and in-demand field allows you to help local health systems (or maybe even major ones) from facing harmful attacks and allows them to operate most efficiently! Healthcare cybersecurity/IT is like the "underground foundations" to a city (the Healthcare Sector), underappreciated yet critical.