Healthcare security firm Clinical Cyber Defense Systems announced the launch of DynamikAnalytix, a security analytics platform designed specifically for the healthcare industry.

The platform detects vulnerabilities across a hospital's digital ecosystem, taking security data generated by a hospital's IT systems and translating and visualizing it as clinical and business risk metrics.

Developed so that hospital executives without any security knowledge can log-in and understand their risk profile, users can look at a dashboard and understand if patient safety or hospital operations are at risk, and why.

"The top cybersecurity challenge facing hospitals today goes beyond technology – it's about knowledge and communication," Dr. Saif Abed, CEO of CCDS, told HealthcareITNews. "What I mean is that security has its own complex language that often seems inaccessible for anyone without some kind of IT background."

Abed said the goal at CCDS is to make all that information actually meaningful and useful for hospital leaders from the CMIO to CEO, and the platform can also be customized and integrated into the products and services of existing cybersecurity vendors, security operations centers and medical device manufacturers.

"At the end of the day, the ultimate risks we are concerned about in healthcare are all to do with patient safety," he said. However, it's not always obvious how a vulnerability in an endpoint can harm patient care. Not every security risk is going to be as obvious as a hacked insulin pump."

Abed said to understand those risks requires a detailed understanding of clinical workflows that exist across entire health systems from the pathology lab to the intensive care unit and everything in between.

"Our team of clinicians have spent the last two years distilling this knowledge and experience into analytical models that mean we can truly map all the direct and indirect patient safety risks that can stem from a single or group of vulnerabilities coming together for any given piece of technology in a hospital,"  he said.

He explained a major challenge for the cybersecurity industry is getting C-level and non-technical leadership engaged with the subject.

"If a platform is going to be adopted, it needs to be intuitive to use and generate immediately actionable information," he said. "That's why we designed DynamikAnalytix so that a single glance at a dashboard can tell you all you need to know about the clinical and business risk status of your hospital."

He noted attackers used to see healthcare as an opportunistic area of attack, and they are going to start becoming more targeted, sophisticated and brazen.

"We will see an increased prevalence of attacks that are specifically structured as a potential threats to patient safety and hospital operations at scale," Abed said. "The confluence of IoT, mobility, interoperability and cloud adoption is going to complicate this even further so it's critical that health system leaders are closely scrutinizing, monitoring and mitigating these risks that come with digital transformation."