Safer, Sooner, Together: A Hippocratic Oath for Connected Medical Devices

Time

11:00 am - 11:45 pm

Speaker

Joshua Corman

Location

Health Delivery Organizations - Asbury Hall: A & B

The promise of connected medicine is to improve and prolong life.

The perils of connectivity may lead to loss of life and limb and a shattering of public confidence.

Our dependence on connected technologies has grown faster than our ability to secure them.

We believe we can be safer, sooner, if we work together.

Modern healthcare increasingly depends on connected technologies to improve the quality, effectiveness, and availability of the best that medical innovations can offer. The promise of Precision Medicine may unlock new cures and breakthroughs to help us treat and conquer some of our most perplexing diseases. Unfortunately, with this promise comes the perils of hyper-connectivity, exposing us all to a bevy of new accidents and adversaries in cyberspace. Sadly, we are not prepared.

While the FDA and industry have made incredible strides over the last two years in cybersafety, 2016 continues to remind us just how much further we have to go. In 2015, an epidemic of ransomware ran havoc through health delivery organizations. In one case, Hollywood Presbyterian was hit so badly it affected patient care and the hospital had to turn ambulances away. Muddy Waters Capital shorted St. Jude’s Medical over what it considered to be material hacking weaknesses in its line of pacemakers.

All systems fail. How prepared we are for failure will make all the difference. To this end, “I am The Cavalry” published a Hippocratic Oath for Connected Medical Devices exploring how to avoid failure, take help avoiding failure, learn from failure, mitigate failure, and inoculate against future failure. We will explore this framework and these five postures toward failure to accelerate our corrective actions across a diverse and challenging stakeholder ecosystem.

We don’t yet have all the answers, but we know we’ll all be safer, sooner, together.