Secure Connected Health

Securing Medical Devices

The medical device security ecosystem is a complex intersection of stakeholders. All participants—from researchers to patients—have a role to play in building and maintaining resilient connected systems. View our representation of the Medical Device Security Ecosystem map to see Booz Allen’s approach to secure connected health. We consider cyber risks, cyber solutions, and stakeholders in the context of the total product lifecycle of medical devices. 

Medical device security within the ecosystem starts from the conception of the device and continues until the final time it is decommissioned. Every phase presents a new set of risks and responsibilities for each participant, including device manufacturers, regulators, and healthcare delivery organizations. For instance:

  • Medical device manufacturers must develop security into products by design and produce patches to maintain security through the lifetime of a device.
  • Regulators serve as a critical fulcrum of the marketplace; the global regulatory bodies’ role is to set standards and assess the benefits versus the risks before products go to market.
  • Healthcare delivery organizations hold the responsibility to protect patients by managing their networks and applying patches to maintain resilience against attack.

Booz Allen supports clients across the total product lifecycle with DevSecOps, regulatory science, cybersecurity integration, asset management, and threat hunting. It is essential to work with manufacturers, regulators, and healthcare delivery organizations to ensure patients have access to new life-saving technologies without undue risk of cyber attack.

Secure Connected Labs

Technological evolutions also advance medical research practices and improving patient care. Networked lab equipment, such as sequencers, generate vast amounts of data that no longer fit in paper notebooks or on laptop hard drives. Petabytes of genomic data often require cloud storage. Digitization of lab data and protocols drives more collaboration between research teams eager to share their findings and broaden the impact of their work. The more sharing we have taking place, the more vulnerabilities we encounter. 

Many scientists need support from engineers to secure their labs and understand the full extent of cybersecurity risks. Securing this data requires the same attention to detail required to protect our most valuable assets, including competitive or proprietary research results, personally identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), and even personal financial records.

Booz Allen offers a unique combination of deep laboratory expertise and award-winning IT systems engineering approaches. Together, we can help science communities implement strategies that provide researchers with more freedom and security to collaborate on the next life-saving, game-changing breakthrough.

Experts in the Field

Contact Us