HHS rolled out a new project Aug. 17 to protect hospitals from the growing cybersecurity threat.
The Digital Health Security project, aka Digiheals, is accepting proposals through Sept. 7 for innovative solutions to keep healthcare organizations secure from ransomware groups and other hackers. The program launches amid increasingly costly — and widespread — cyberattacks on hospitals and health systems.
"The Digiheals project comes when the U.S. healthcare system urgently requires rigorous cybersecurity capabilities to protect patient privacy, safety and lives," said Renee Wegrzyn, PhD, director of HHS research agency ARPA-H, in a news release. "Currently, off-the-shelf software tools fall short in detecting emerging cyberthreats and protecting our medical facilities, resulting in a technical gap we seek to bridge with this initiative."
The project is looking for proposals in such areas as security protocols, vulnerability detection, and automatic patching.
"We're looking for rapid and stupendous progress," program manager Andrew Carney told Wired. "We want to ensure that the impact we have is significant but also equitably distributed. It doesn't matter if we develop a perfect cure that makes a network completely impenetrable if a rural hospital can't adopt it because of light IT staff or minimal or no security budget."