Healthcare Institutions Face Cybersecurity Threats as They Move to Green Tech
Digitalization is ongoing since many decades in a lot of healthcare institutions. The more digitized a healthcare institution is, the more services and quality it can be provided to patients.
This, however, means that medical data and transactions which once were offline, are now possibly accessible from anywhere on Earth. Stored patients data, for example, can be hacked or stolen, and medical systems can be infected by malware, making the healthcare provider to unable to diagnose patients or access critical medical data at times of need.
1- The Motivation for a Green Energy
The world recently started to look for more diverse sources of energy, which motivated the switch to green tech and renewables in a faster rate than before.
The Cybersecurity aspect of a digital transformation has, in turn, become more serious and required, because the number of Cybersecurity attacks has increased substantially since the invasion.
This became a problem for healthcare institutions; they are required to move to the digital world while using the most clean and climate-friendly energy sources, and reducing their energy footprint as much as possible, while also not forgetting the importance of the security aspect on their daily operations and the possible Cybersecurity threats that can emerge.
In this article on Eco-friendly technical transformation we will see what are the steps that a healthcare institution should take to solve that problem.
2- Framework for Healthcare Institutions’ Shift to Green Tech
We will explore a quick framework for how healthcare institutions such as hospitals, clinics, and laboratories should make the switch to green tech in the most secure and efficient way.
1.Specifying the objectives
The first thing is understanding the main goals of the digital transformation that you want to take: Is your goal to make the medical data more accessible, secure and serviceable? Is your goal to get more customers if you are a for-profit healthcare institution? Or maybe your goals include more than these things?
Once you specify your main goals, you need to rank them according to their importance to you, and see which one of them can be classified as critical or optional.
This will help you a lot in the future in decision-making, as you won’t have to spend time again to see what you actually want to achieve in each step of the digital transformation, and what you can possibly negotiate or compromise and what you can never let go.
2.Understanding the size of Needed Resources
The second step is understanding what are the needed resources for you once you achieve your digital transformation to green tech.
Of course, there are budget, time and effort constrains, but we are not concerned with these at the moment in this article. But what we want to focus on is:
- The total energy footprint of your healthcare institution once you complete your digital transformation.
- The computational power and security of your digital systems.
Ideally, and for a more climate-friendly and less resource-hungry consumption of resources, you do not want your healthcare institution to use any energy more than it actually needs to fulfill its operations. Thus, this should be a main discussion point with your digital transformation adviser when you start designing it. It is not difficult at all to monitor the energy consumption with such sustainable gear as smart plug and other devices described in eco-friendly tech guide.
The second important thing is related to your medical systems in your institution. Whether your institution is a hospital, clinic or laboratory, you will always need to have online systems that can store and access medical data, and other software programs that can help you operate the medical devices your healthcare providers may need in their work.
For this aspect, it is significant to take into account using the best medical software and systems which do not require a lot of computational power; because computational power will take a lot of energy which by turn would increase your Carbon footprint.
Your IT advisor should have a good idea on what software or system services could be more green and energy-friendly than the others.
3.Implementing Security by Design
A lot of healthcare institution managers do not understand that security is not a plugin that can be easily installed on any healthcare operation. Instead, security and safety may require changing the way healthcare providers do their work from the smallest things all the way up.
When you design your healthcare systems, make sure that you have consulted with multiple Cybersecurity advisors and specialists before you start implementing them. Leaving the Cybersecurity all the way to the end or after the implementation may cause you to waste a lot of your budget and resources again to fix what you have not done before, or worse, you may get hacked by malicious 3rd-party actors if you do not act quickly enough.
If you do that, then you won’t have to waste more resources while doing your digital transformation, which by turn, will make your organization more green and Eco-friendly.
Conclusion
We have seen in this article what are the important concepts and ideas to take into account when designing your digital transformation process, and how to make that process Eco-friendly and green as much as possible.
The human population has exceeded 8 billion people on the planet, and unrestricted resources' consumption is no longer a possible choice. Regulations are coming and the energy consumption by each individual, company or organization has to go down if we want a sustainable future for all human beings.
