Patient safety also depends on the safety of the health care system IT infrastructure – lessons learned from a cyberattack against the British NHS

Fri, 2017 / 11 / 17

On the 12th of May 2017 the British National Health Service (NHS) became a victim of a cyberattack by a malware called ”WannaCry“. The attacked affected most of the NHS hospitals and general practices in the UK. Scheduled surgery needed to be cancelled and several emergency units had to refuse patient admission because they were not able to work with their computer systems anymore. Neither digital X-ray imaging nor the examination of patient’s epicrisis was possible.

The NHS hospitals which are the furthest away from having paperfree medical systems were able to deal with this situation, whereas general practices, of which many don’t rely on paper backup systems anymore had to close.

The British press discovered later on, that most computers were running on outdated operating systems and that the budget for ongoing security support has been cut. Poorly Riskfunded healthcare can pose risk for patients when it is coming to specific attacks of the IT infrastructure.

All health care workers now have a responsibility to educate each other about this emerging threat and demand that funds are made available to ensure that the software we use is as up to date as the medicines we prescribe“ wrote physicians Rachel Clarke and Taryn Youngstein in their Perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Medical digitalization has its clear advantages in making daily work for physicians and health care workers easier and contributing to patient safety, but it is no universal remedy. It requires new considerations on digital safety and also new financial budgeting to be up to date in IT systems‘ safety.

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