Hackers have upped their cyberattacks on the healthcare supply chain, putting hospitals and health systems in a position to respond.
In three separate incidents over the course of a few months, Russian-speaking ransomware gangs have targeted hospital blood supplier OneBlood, U.K.-based pathology organization Synnovis, and blood plasma provider Octapharma.
While the cyberattacks were seemingly unrelated, the events should act as "a wake-up call" to "address supply chain security and resilience," the American Hospital Association and Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center wrote in an August notice.
"Organizations should prioritize applying risk management assessment principles to their critical suppliers and partners," they wrote. "Consider supply-chain outages, and availability, determine impact to business operations and care delivery, and identify alternative suppliers or use multiple suppliers to create redundancy. The idea is to eliminate the single points of failure in healthcare supply chains and minimize disruptions to healthcare delivery in the event of ransomware attacks on critical suppliers."