How vulnerable is the healthcare in the U S- Craig Richardville answers

Craig Richardville, CIO discusses how vulnerable healthcare is in the United States.

John: 2016 is being called “The Year of the healthcare hack.” From your vantage point, how vulnerable is the health care system in the U.S. and what are you doing at Carolina’s to protect patient information while still allowing that patient information to still flow… because obviously that’s a very unique paradigm compared to other industries?

Craig: Yes, it’s a challenge, it’s a challenge not only for healthcare but it’s a challenge for all of the industries… a lot of the examples are non health care… you know intrusions that have taken place over the last several years and some of the hardship that are caused when that happens. And we look at the medical record for our patients that actually are a product or that is much more valuable in the black market and something that needs to require that kind of protection.

So what we’re trying to do is actually set policy as an industry and try to get the proper public / private relationship in place. Certainly if you look take a look at other types of intrusions that would take place…there’s things that I don’t have to worry about. I don’t have to worry about somebody sending missiles over to our health care system and bombing it.

There are other things that the company or that the nation does nationally to protect us and our borders, unfortunately the way that information systems are built and the way that the Internet was devised has to be shared globally. You have nations, states and other people with other initiatives wanting to come in or for other reasons, want to come in and grab our information.

So, now you start to see separate agencies within the government share information and to make that information public to us. But we as a secure provider or protector of that information now have more access….There nobody within our industry that wants to see a hack or any type of intrusion take place. So this is something that we’re not competitive about, but we’re actually trying to collaborate on because what we want to do is ensure that the patients information is certainly protected and they entrust that information to us to protect it, so no matter what different provider that the patient does go to, the intent is that we can all have some level of standards that allows us to be able to protect the information for the benefit of the patients.