Cyber Policy Development

Establishing effective cyber security governance within a healthcare delivery organization will improve processes and procedures used to identify and mitigate risks, improve processes that properly identify and validate appropriateness of medical devices, establish classifications of cyber security risks, strengthen risk controls, as well as build internal and external relationships needed to secure protected information. Without effective cyber security governance, patients, their data, and the hospitals that manage it, remain at high risk of cyber-attack

Establishing the policies, procedures, and processes required to create cyber security comprehensive governance is a multistep process.

1. Managing Key Players
In addition to external stakeholders such as regulatory agencies and medical device manufacturers, it is imperative to identify who the internal stakeholders are, what are their roles and responsibilities, how will they contribute to and be impacted by the governance program.

• Understanding who the stakeholders and key players are
• Establishing roles for stakeholders and key players
• Creating a communication plan
• Training

2. Perform a Risk Assessment
The goal of performing a risk assessment is to identify risks for mitigation. As best practice, risk assessments are performed in all industries using mostly similar approaches, documented in universal ISO standards.

• Inventory and categorize assets
• Review organizational policies, procedures, and processes
• Review regulatory requirements
• Analyze system for risks
• Evaluate and rate risks for priority

Without these best practices, cybersecurity governance programs often fail. Most commonly, failure stems from incomplete inventories, incomplete risk assessments, a disjointed management approach, and failure to keep up with change. This is where Emeritus can help. We understand that implementing a successful cybersecurity governance program is a significant undertaking. It requires close coordination of a multitude of internal and external stakeholders, specialty software for managing assets, users, and data protection, well-thought out plans, training, and continuous improvement.