4 Ways AI Can Improve Healthcare Security

By Healthcare Tech Outlook | Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Hospitals need to operate diligently to protect themselves, and their patients from security vulnerabilities, and AI can help realize this cause to a great extend.

FREMONT, CA: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already helping hospitals all over the world ease their administrative activities and improve patient health outcomes. Now, AI is being used to help augment human efforts to improve healthcare security and ensure patient data safety. AI implementation in healthcare security ensures data security and patient safety. Maintaining the focus on addressing these issues will, in the future, will become increasingly essential. Here are the key ways AI can combat healthcare security challenges and help protect hospitals head into the future of healthcare.

• Identifying News Threats

The human cost of stolen patient data is complex to quantify. Health data is not protected from fraud adequately, making medical identity theft hard to recover from. If data breaches result in false patient records, patients could risk serious health consequences. AI can help prevent these breaches by proactively searching for malware signatures. Using historical data, these AI applications learn to identify malware patterns even when the destructive program is not known previously.

• Responding to Breaches

If a security violation does occur, AI helps identify and isolate these threats faster than conventional security measures. AI automatically and continuously monitors behavior within a healthcare network by flagging anomalies as they happen. Behavioral indicators are potential tools for identifying malware. Once the threat is identified, AI can either forward the case to central human oversight or be designed to take autonomous action to mitigate the breach's impact.

• Protecting Medical Devices

Smart medical devices are serious threats to patient safety if left unprotected from remote breaches. AI can help address this most challenging barrier to securing medical devices. Medical electronics are typically designed by third-party suppliers who use diverse operating systems and proprietary codes. This makes it complex for hospital systems to evaluate equipment for security flaws. AI can assist with data encryption and monitoring for malware, especially in the automatic identification of threats, without being reliant on manufacturers to reveal vulnerabilities.

• Extending Human Resources

The number of potential threats can overextend security staff, harming their efficacy, and contributing to burnout. AI solutions allow hospitals to process vast datasets rapidly and efficiently, freeing professionals to focus their time, effort, and experience on the highest-priority potential tasks.