News Releases

Cyber Security Exercises Led by The Center

Regional healthcare cyber security exercises were recently led by The Center for Health Affairs’ Emergency Preparedness team.

The Center’s emergency preparedness experts collaborated with its regional healthcare partners to design and coordinate its annual regional exercise, which is comprised of three parts:

• A risk assessment and mitigation tabletop
• An individual agency functional exercise
• A final recovery tabletop discussion

The scenario chosen to test facility-specific and regional emergency operation plans was a wide spread power outage resulting from a cyber-attack. Strategies were shared among 28 participating hospital and healthcare partners at both of the tabletop events, and individual plans were put to test at each agency location during the functional exercise. Participation in a community exercise is part of the Joint Commission accreditation and the new Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services requirements for hospitals and healthcare facilities.

“Having this three-part cyber security exercise allowed representatives from various hospital positions, departments and whole hospital systems to come together to discuss and find solutions to a very potential situation they may be faced with,” said Beth Gatlin, RN, MA-HSM, ASPR project director, The Center for Health Affairs. “It’s was a very pertinent and extremely beneficial emergency preparedness exercise.”

For questions about theses regional cyber security exercises and other emergency preparedness activities, contact us.

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.@neohospitals collaborated w/ regional healthcare partners on annual 3-part cyber security exercise.