Leaders of the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) have announced the launch of a new center to help the healthcare industry deal with increasing threats to cybersecurity.

The HITRUST Cybersecurity Incident Response and Coordination Center will provide “crucial support” for the healthcare industry, HITRUST leaders say. The support includes facilitating the early identification of cybersecurity attacks, coordination of response activities and creation of best practices. In addition, the center will make available cyber threat information to the broader industry.  

According to HITRUST, the center will focus on cybersecurity threats and events targeted at healthcare organizations in areas, including, networks, mobile devices, workstations, servers and medical devices. This sharing of information is crucial for organizations’ preparedness, protection and crisis management, HITRUST leaders say.

[See also: Breaches epidemic despite efforts at compliance, says Kroll.]

“Cyber attacks are an increasing concern for every organization and Wellpoint recognizes an important component of our strategy is to collaborate with industry and government to most effectively address this issue,” said Roy Mellinger, vice president and chief information security officer, Wellpoint.

The center is working initially with 14 leading industry organizations, representing health plans and health systems, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to share various incident information, according to HITRUST. The center will collaborate with HITRUST and others to identify and remediate incidents, and will also obtain and synthesize cyber threat and response information from numerous other sources to make the information more readily available to center participants. HITRUST will lead the center’s participants in evaluating appropriate tools and related security mechanisms to support the center’s efforts.

Daniel Nutkis, chief executive officer of HITRUST says the commitment of the founding organizations to provide their time, experiences and resources in support of the broader industry is what will make it a success.

“The support of these organizations combined with the experience HITRUST has in developing and communicating information security concepts to organizations in various segments, of varying sizes and with varying levels of technical knowledge will be crucial in ensuring we arm the industry to respond more timely and aggressively to future cyber attacks,” Nutkis says.

HITRUST’s experience during the past five years in supporting the healthcare industry’s efforts for information protection has shown it that the wide variety of types, sizes and competencies of organizations are not well suited to a one-size-fits-all approach. Therefore, the center’s initial focus will be on early threat detection, alerting, remediation and notification to organizations capable of consuming more technical alerting information, HITRUST leaders say.

The center will also work with industry, service and solution providers to identify and implement a method to provide meaningful information to all types of organizations and technical competency levels within the entire industry. Once the method has been implemented the center will transition to a formal Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC).

“As the healthcare industry continues its conversion process to full patient electronic medical records, it will most certainly become a more frequent target of cybersecurity attacks, and having such a system in place in the near future will be key to collaboratively responding and preventing such attacks,” said Jorge DeCesare, chief data security administrator, Dignity Health.

[See also: Breaches epidemic despite efforts at compliance, says Kroll.]

The center and its efforts will be featured in a session at HITRUST 2012, a world-class event for healthcare information security professionals, taking place May 7-9 in Grapevine, Texas.

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