Security in healthcare is tough. Threats keep increasing rapidly. The attack surface is expanding. It feels incredibly overwhelming today. A hidden weapon in this battle against nefarious actors is time…or more accurately timeliness. One healthcare organization changed their approach to security and made time their ally.
I sat down with Patrick McGill, President and CEO of Community Health Network, and Jon Brown from TripleKey. We discussed the overwhelming pace of security threats and why moving away from point-in-time security audits to real-time vulnerability scanning better protects operations.
What This Conversation Revealed
- Patient Safety Risks: Large scale attacks shut down critical hospital systems and delay care. By elevating cybersecurity to a clinical priority, leaders protect patient safety and ensure care delivery.
- Outdated Audits: Point in time security audits become obsolete the very next day. By implementing continuous real-time monitoring, health systems spot and address new vulnerabilities instantly.
- Slow Patching Cycles: Waiting months to patch vulnerabilities leaves networks highly exposed to immediate exploits. Using live data to trigger rapid mitigation drastically shrinks the window of exposure.
Cybersecurity Is a Patient Safety Mandate
Security is no longer just an IT problem. It is a fundamental requirement for delivering care. When large scale attacks occur, the consequences extend far beyond exposed data.
“We previously thought that it [cybersecurity] was IT technical security,” explained McGill. However, that compartmentalized thinking is no longer accurate. “When you look at the last few years, the large-scale attacks that have occurred in healthcare, it is clearly a patient safety issue. Patients simply cannot get treated when the system is under attack.”
Ditch the Snapshot for Continuous Monitoring
Annual security audits provide a false sense of comfort. They capture a single moment in time. The reality of modern networks is much messier.
McGill compared these reviews to cleaning a house. “I would see that we would do a security or a technical review, and you get a snapshot in time,” McGill shared. “That’s like coming into somebody’s house and it’s clean and everything’s in place, but the next day the kids have destroyed it and everything’s out of place”.
Healthcare needs continuous visibility. Relying on static security audits no longer works.
Brown agreed, emphasizing the need to leave paper-based assessments behind. “Getting rid of forms and moving to facts all builds the trust that we need for our patients,” noted Brown. He added that the industry must move to a “data driven process and using real-time data to actually mitigate the issues”
Speed to Mitigation is the Only Defense
The traditional patching cycle is broken.
“We’re seeing attackers actually have an exploit the same day that that vulnerability’s announced, but it may take two months to get the vulnerability patched by the health system,” warned Brown.
Organizations must move faster. “By using real time data such as triple key, we know when the vulnerability is there and we know immediately how to mitigate it,” Brown explained. Shrinking that timeline is the ultimate goal.
The Health IT Reality
The reality is that healthcare security is a race against time. The days of relying on periodic assessments and slow patching schedules are over. IT leaders must embrace continuous monitoring and rapid mitigation to protect their organizations. If you cannot spot a vulnerability in a timely manner and fix it immediately, your patients are at risk.
What Healthcare IT Leaders Are Asking
Why is real-time monitoring necessary for healthcare security?
Real-time monitoring is essential because threat actors move incredibly fast. A point in time security audit only validates the environment at that exact moment. By the next day, new vulnerabilities can emerge or configurations can change. Continuous monitoring allows healthcare IT teams to see their true risk posture at all times and respond immediately to new threats.
How does delayed patching impact patient safety?
When health systems take months to apply security patches, they leave their networks open to immediate exploitation. If an attacker breaches the network through an unpatched vulnerability, they can shut down critical clinical applications. This directly impacts patient safety because clinicians lose access to the tools they need to deliver care safely.
How can health systems speed up their mitigation efforts?
Health systems can accelerate mitigation by moving away from manual compliance forms and adopting data-driven security tools. These platforms provide immediate visibility into where vulnerabilities exist across the enterprise and offer direct paths to fix them. Having a shared, transparent view of the data allows internal teams and vendor partners to collaborate quickly and close security gaps.
Learn more about TripleKey at https://www.triplekey.com/
Learn more about Community Health Network at https://www.ecommunity.com/
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About Vidhya Bhat