When former VP Dick Cheney last year disclosed that doctors had disabled the wireless capabilities in his pacemaker because of hacker concerns, it hammered home the dangers posed by network-connected medical devices. Such concerns have finally prompted the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to convene a collaborative industry-wide effort to bolster medical device cyber security. As a first step, the FDA will host a workshop in Arlington, Va., next month during which it hopes to bring together medical device manufacturers, healthcare providers, biomedical engineers, IT systems administrators, health insurers, and others. The goal of the two-day event is to spur a discussion on the best ways to identify and mitigate cybersecurity vulnerabilities in commonly used medical devices.
