University of California San Diego’s Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity has received an award of up to $29.9 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. The money will fund tools that map the networked technology hospitals depend on to deliver care.
The award, announced Oct. 27, runs a maximum of four years. It funds a project called PANACEA-H. The partners are the American Hospital Association, the University of Maryland in College Park and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
The project aims to find critical weak points before they fail. The 2024 Change Healthcare ransomware attack, for instance, disrupted operations across the country and cost the industry billions in lost revenue.
“When it comes to cyber resiliency, you can’t protect what you don’t see,” said principal investigator Jeff Tully, MD. Dr. Tully is co-director of the center and an associate clinical professor of anesthesiology at the university’s School of Medicine.
Dr. Tully said traditional dependency mapping can be incomplete and error-prone, producing static snapshots. Those snapshots can quickly go stale as new technology, sector consolidation and regulatory changes reshape networks.
PANACEA-H has four workstreams:
- John Riggi, the AHA’s national advisor for cybersecurity and risk, leads one that surveys experts from several hundred hospitals.
- A second analyzes real-world internet data to build network maps that update automatically.
- A third monitors Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and other signals to locate networked medical devices.
- A fourth mines job postings, press releases, hospital websites and Medicare data to infer which vendors and software hospitals use.
Mr. Riggi called the systemic risk a “cyber blast radius,” in which an attack on one part of the sector can cascade across all of it.
The tools PANACEA-H develops will be made available to federal agencies, state and local public health systems and care delivery organizations.
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