Project Proposal Update

Our Investigation

Similar to the Institute for healthcare improvement, our systems project will investigate on at
least one of the three critical objectives that can potentially lead better models for
providing better healthcare. The following critical objectives are:

● Improve the health of the defined population
● Enhance patient care experience (including quality access and reliability)
● Reduce or at least control the per capita cost of care

Our project would like to focus on improving the health of a defined population by investigating medical device hacking and its various effects on the population. We would like to explore the following topics regarding medical device hacking during the course of the project.

● Positive and negative implications for medical device hacking
● How vulnerable are medical devices really?
● How vulnerable are hospitals are to a malware attack?

By exposing the potential security problems with these devices, we will be able to improve the health of the population by providing devices immune to hacking and security breaches. Safer devices will prevent mishaps that could lead to serious health problems and death.

Further Structure of our Research

Up to this point, we have realized that many of our sources are news articles or short articles from various different medical sources. We need to first dive deeper into scholarly worksto really understand what has been happening with this issue and what progress is currently being made. In addition, we need to reach out to experts in the field of both data security and healthcare devices to get a better sense of their current experience on this topic.

Interviews

We think that one of our own here at the Eller College, Dr. Faiz Currim, will be a huge help for our research. Since he has background in both data security and healthcare information systems, we think he will be able to give us a fair, unbiased point of view on both topics and how they work together. In addition, we think he is knowledgeable in this fairly recent phenomenon and will be able to talk directly about the hacking of medical devices and how we can best come to our conclusions. A few of our sample questions for the interview are displayed below:

·       Have data security and healthcare systems been separate entities in the past? Have you noticed a merging of them recently?

·       How specifically can a hospital be endangered by a connected device that is on the hospital’s network?

·       Why do you think that these companies are not motivated to make more secure products?

·       Why do you think the FDA is not doing more right now to regulate these devices?

·       So you believe there is a real threat in this space? What is in it for the hackers, from your perspective?

·       Will security really make these devices more secure? Won’t the hackers just be able to break through some of this security anyway?