The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for the House Committee on Energy and Commerce raised concerns about cybersecurity risks in aging medical devices during an April 1 hearing.
During the hearing, experts warned that outdated hardware, which can often outlast its software, poses a serious threat to patient safety, according to an April 1 news release from the American Hospital Association.
“Our patients depend on millions of medical devices, many of them aging machines, to deliver life-saving care,” said Christian Dameff, MD, emergency physician and co-director for the Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity at UC San Diego Health. “The cybersecurity of our legacy medical devices thus becomes a literal matter of life or death.”
Erik Decker, chief information security officer at Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health, also emphasized that the attacks on medical devices could endanger patient safety and national security.
