Security News > 2020 > December > New NIST guide helps healthcare orgs securely deploy PACS

The cybersecurity challenges of securing PACS. Medical imaging is a critical component in providing patient care and PACS is where these images and accompanying clinical information are stored and delivered from when needed.

PACS is part of a highly complex healthcare delivery organization environment that includes back-office systems, electronic health record systems, pharmacy and laboratory systems, an array of electronic medical devices, and often cloud storage for medical images.

"Various departments operating in the HDO have unique medical imaging needs and may operate their own PACS or other medical imaging archiving systems. Further, HDOs may use external medical imaging specialists when reviewing patient medical data. The PACS ecosystem may include multiple systems for managing medical imaging data, along with a diverse clinical user community, accessing PACS from different locations. This complexity leads to cybersecurity challenges."

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence at NIST built a laboratory environment to emulate a medical imaging environment, performed a risk assessment, and identified controls from the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to secure a medical imaging ecosystem.

"The final practice guide, which in addition to incorporating feedback from the public and other stakeholders, builds on the draft guide by adding remote storage capabilities into the PACS architecture. This effort offers a more comprehensive security solution that more closely mirrors real-world HDO networking environments," NIST added.

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