CCPL

Richard Staynings presents at the Canadian Conference on Physician Leadership

The challenges faced by Canadian healthcare in protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the health and personal data of Canadian patients is great. But so too is the job of ensuring that healthcare IT systems and other critical infrastructure remains available to treat patients in today's IT-centric health delivery model, where system outages possibly as the result of a cyber attack, can mean life or death for a patient.

This was the subject of a workshop today at the 2017 Canadian Conference on Physician Leadership in Vancouver, BC, where many of Canada's top Physicians and Chief Medical Officers met to discuss many of the challenges and concerns facing the industry.

Participants learned not just about some of the cyber threats and risks being faced by healthcare in Canada and world wide, but also about some of the successes of other health providers to put in place effective, holistic security controls to block attacks and to protect personal health information, clinical research and other intellectual property from compromise.

As the leader of these workshops, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to everyone who attended and contributed to the debate. Canadian healthcare took a giant step forward today in recognizing, not just how much the industry needs to catch up with the better funded banks and other financial institutions, but also in understanding that cybersecurity is a business risk in which clinicians play a critical and leading part in helping to secure vital IT systems from attack.

A copy of the deck presented today can be downloaded here.

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