The focus on AI in healthcare has largely been on the range of emerging clinical applications, but there’s no shortage of other uses, as well.
To wit, GE Healthcare recently unveiled a new cybersecurity tool dubbed Skeye, which is a monitoring system that taps AI and process management tools to monitor a provider’s connected devices help them to detect, analyze and respond to threats and events in real time.
A vendor-agnostic service, Skeye helps protect networked medical devices regardless of age or operating system, and its comprehensive coverage provides monitoring and threat detection and remediation for connected medical devices under a GE Healthcare service contract.
As the Internet of Medical Things expands and devices become ever more connected, cybersecurity risk naturally increases. In 2018 alone, 82 percent of hospital technology experts reported a “significant security incident,” with the average data breach costing $3.86 million.
In addition to detecting threats, Skeye’s AI features automate connected device inventory and equipment risk profiling throughout a hospital to create a dynamic management system for device onboarding and decommissioning. The company says it’s also a cost-savings tool that provides a full understanding of the networking and security parameters of connected clinical devices and continually updates data when new clinical devices are introduced onto a network or retired. Identifying these parameters otherwise costs as much as $250,000 to gather and record.
According to reports, one healthcare organization that recently piloted Skeye is T.J. Regional Health, an independent, multisite organization with two hospitals, a health pavilion, and eight outlying clinics to support communities in southern Kentucky recently partnered with GE Healthcare to pilot the new Skeye offering. The goal of the pilot was to ensure T.J. had robust cybersecurity systems to help protect against vulnerabilities and breaches.
“Defending T.J. Regional Health against malicious cyberattacks and protecting our patients, data and medical facilities is a top priority,” said Chad Friend, Director of IT at T.J. Regional Health.
“We wanted to stay current with cybersecurity trends, assess the risk across our hospitals and clinics and analyze our own preparedness,” he added. “As a small hospital group, we don’t have a large IT team. Accessing the global scale, tools and expertise of GE Healthcare gave us a partner to ensure we have a robust cybersecurity process in place and access to the latest information and action plans. After all, who knows how to protect the devices better than an equipment manufacturer?”
Friend said the assessment and recommendations from GE Healthcare helped his facility implement a more proactive cybersecurity plan, better connect between departments, define a cybersecurity policy and install proper procedures and policies for device security management.