Autonomous computer systems are healthcare's best protection against disruptive cyberattacks, Oracle's Larry Ellison and Seema Verma wrote April 1 in The Wall Street Journal.
Like self-driving cars protect drivers by reducing human errors, autonomous systems can similarly shield healthcare providers from hackers, the two leaders contended.
"Autonomous systems are difficult to attack because they don't allow humans to configure them, relying instead on databases and operating systems that automatically configure themselves," wrote Mr. Ellison, Oracle's co-founder and chief technology officer, and Ms. Verma, general manager of Oracle Health (formerly Cerner) and Oracle Life Sciences. "Humans, with their propensity for error and mischief, shouldn't be trusted to configure critical parts of the system."
Ms. Verma, who led CMS during the Trump administration, recently touted Oracle Health's "military-grade" cybersecurity at the HIMSS health IT conference in Orlando, Fla.
Healthcare organizations should also get rid of passwords in favor of passcodes that are computer-generated, making them "virtually impossible to steal," the executives said.
"Passcodes, autonomous databases and autonomous operating systems are all currently available in second-generation cloud systems," Mr. Ellison and Ms. Verma wrote. "The sooner healthcare systems start using autonomous systems, the safer they and their patients will be."