Intelligent Health.tech Issue 14 | Page 63

D I G I T A L D I A G N O S T I C S

Research respondents were segmented by country , role type and vertical . We saw 631 respondents from UK and US-based organisations take part including CIOs , CISOs , CTOs , senior security professionals and AppSec teams from a range of industries . Of these respondents , 102 were from healthcare organisations . Here is an overview of the key findings in that sector .

Interoperability has become the watchword for the industry .
Today , healthcare providers have a multitude of medical systems sharing information within hospitals , as well as connecting to external healthcare providers . Combine this with the demand for personal health and wellbeing devices , whereby citizens can add data to their own personal health profile , and you can see how growth in health data is exploding .
Consequently , interoperability has become the watchword as the industry coordinates care for patients across a large and growing subset of players . This is where Application Programming Interfaces ( APls ) have become a critical component , allowing systems to communicate with each other , closing the gap on how information is utilised . The philosophy being that all systems are integrated , work together in a compliant way , and any sensitive data is secure in the event of a breach .
Twelve months on from Noname Security ’ s last survey and we can see that APls continue to pose significant risks to businesses around the world . Noname Security undertook its API Security
Disconnect research again in 2023 and the results highlighted that this is the year when these risks are becoming so apparent that companies can no longer ignore them . In this study , Noname Security examines the challenges facing organisations when it comes to API security .
Unfortunately , due to a multitude of technological gaps , this is not always the case . Likewise , there has been a lack of data standards across the sector and multiple siloed technologies have been deployed . This means custom APIs must be created to accommodate the needs of the service it is providing for each system , which is time-consuming because API management is onerous as systems are upgraded and replaced .
The good news is that these days there are several global open healthcare standards ; Health Level Seven ( HL7 ®), Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources ( FHIR ®) and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine ( DICOM ®). FHIR is an API-focused standard used to represent how healthcare information can be exchanged between different systems regardless of how it is stored in those systems . HL7 is a set of international standards for the transfer of clinical and administrative data between software applications used by various healthcare providers . DICOM is the standard for the communication and management of medical imaging information and related data . All these standards help to ensure data privacy

API SECURITY RISKS :

A CLOSER LOOK AT HEALTHCARE ’ S GROWING CONCERNS

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