Saving Lives with Modern, Adaptive, Secure Healthcare IT
It has become customary for most of society to have health and wellness information at their fingertips, turning to over 350,000 health apps available to them1. Driven by this—and many other digital changes in how patients expect to interact with their care providers—the healthcare sector is undergoing a ton of digital transformation, leveraging advanced technologies on devices, apps, and the cloud to help meet the growing patient demand.
The healthcare sector’s investments in IT are helping find the fastest paths to improved service by bringing care closer to the patient. Many healthcare companies are tapping into massive amounts of clinical and other health data to track developments and get broad-stroke trends of the overall healthcare landscape, while moving as close to precision care as possible.
As the World Health Organization (WHO) notes, digital health will be valued and adopted if it meets the following criteria2:
- It is accessible and supports equitable and universal access to quality health services.
- It enhances the efficiency and sustainability of health systems in delivering quality, affordable, and equitable care.
- It strengthens and scales up health promotion, disease prevention, diagnosis, management, rehabilitation, and palliative care.
- It respects the privacy and security of patient health information.
As seen from this report, four key points are accessibility, efficiency, scale, and security, which, when combined, promote better patient care.
Pointing to accessibility and efficiency, the 451 Group predicts that, by 2024, healthcare facility devices and hospital beds will collectively make up 50% of total devices. Personal monitoring devices are expected to make up the other half.3 Many of these devices rely on third-party components for the operating system, shared services, and application interfaces.
This leaves us with the scale and security aspects. Here, it’s all about the complete ecosystem of devices, systems, and applications, many of which interact with each other through application programming interfaces (APIs). To paint a picture of how impactful this can be, according to F5's State of Application Strategy Report, 41% of organizations juggle between 200 and 1,000 applications.4
Further highlighting the challenges healthcare organizations face in this realm, Gartner predicts that by 2025, 45% of organizations worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software supply chains, a threefold increase from 2021.5
Healthcare organizations are struggling to find a way to guard their patients’ protected health information (PHI) while delivering quality care and maintaining digital transaction integrity for payments and health records alike. Facing constant challenges with digital fraud, they also need to give patients easier access to their health data by reducing customer friction while battling the malicious automated bots that wreak havoc in every corner of their IT operations.
Develop Modern Applications to Protect Data Privacy and Integrity
Patients expect that their privacy is secure at every turn throughout their experience, shielding their electronic health records (EHRs) and personally identifiable information (PII) from prying eyes and malicious actors. With F5 and Google Cloud, you can safely store and analyze sensitive, personally identifiable information with multiple layers of physical and logical protection.
Now, you can bring care closer to your patients faster by modernizing your existing applications, building new ones, and running them in the latest hybrid or multi-cloud environments that can stand up to a range of ever-evolving attack types. With F5 and Google Cloud, you can build and support adaptive apps and automate security and performance policies by shifting them left within your DevSecOps program.
F5 and Google Cloud also guard against common application and system vulnerabilities, helping your teams mitigate emerging exploits that target open source software and security misconfigurations across clouds.
Deliver Patient Care with Confidence
When immediate, informed care is required, having access to applications, services, and data is crucial. Providers are exploring using multiple services and data sources, as well as artificial intelligence, to uncover personalized care recommendations for patients. Access to this information and these capabilities shouldn’t put the patient’s data at risk of compromise or misuse. The applications and systems must automatically adapt to changing attack tactics without inserting user friction to ensure timely care delivery and user satisfaction.
With F5 and Google Cloud, you can leverage built-in AI and machine learning capabilities to monitor medical activity for comprehensive insights into fraud or risky behavior. This enables organizations to identify and stop sophisticated, malicious activity initiated by unauthorized users and automated bots without frustrating legitimate users. Centralized security management across your cloud infrastructure delivers simple, fast, and scalable multi-cloud protection.
Secure Healthcare Operations with F5 and Google Cloud
F5 and Google Cloud have a vision for protecting and powering applications that can meet the digital demands of the healthcare sector by providing modern, patient-centric services that protect personal health information from compromise, fraud, and misuse.
F5 and Google Cloud enable frictionless security that protects your critical applications from automated bot attacks, payment fraud, account takeover, unauthorized access, DDoS attacks, DNS attacks, and attacks against APIs. Together, we help healthcare organizations deliver extraordinary digital healthcare experiences through adaptive applications that grow, shrink, defend, and gain insights to evolve to changing environments quickly.
F5 is #AForceFor protected, insightful, accessible healthcare data.
For more information, please visit: www.f5.com/solutions/healthcare
Sources:
1 IQVIA, Digital Health Trends 2021, July 2021
2 World Health Organization, Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020-2025, May 2021
3 S&P Global: 451 Group, Growth in Connected Medical Devices Furthers the Need for Authentication, January 2021
4 F5, 2022 State of Application Strategy Report, April 2022
5 Gartner, 7 Top Trends in Cybersecurity for 2022, April 2022