Last week, Washington-area MedStar Health restored its systems after a ransomware attack which locked its data and systems. Considering the rising incidents of attacks on hospital systems, internet security experts and hospital officials have said that the cyberattack on the health care provider has come up as a threatening indication that an industry in competition to digitize patient records and services has encountered a new type of security threat for which it isn’t ready yet. Organizations should consider increasing their budget on security of consumer data.

For long, hospitals and the health care industry have been dedicatedly focused on saving patient data from bad guys. However, the recent attack at MedStar and other hospitals nationwide has underlined an even more alarming downside of data breaches. This is because now hospitals rely more on electronic systems for care coordination, critical health data communication and for avoiding medication errors. In case of hackers’ attack, the well being of patients may also be at stake.

Electronic systems have been in use to avoid errors. With the increased usage of computer systems, pharmacists can't review lab results of a patient easily, see the medications the patients have been on or what the allergies they could have.

Nurses managing drugs can't scan the wristband of the patient or a medicine as an ultimate check that they have been providing the right treatment. In case of existence of lab results, just on a piece of paper in the file of a patient, there is likelihood that they may be accidentally removed by a heavily occupied doctor or nurse due to which important information may simply disappear.

Daniel Nigrin, chief information officer of Boston Children's Hospital, whose network was attacked in April 2014 by the hacker collective Anonymous, said that there is one thing that has been becoming clearer mainly over the past few weeks or months: the fact that health care is increasingly becoming a target for this at a fast pace.

Nigrin added, “What struck us at that point was, you know what: these attacks can do a lot more than get your data; they can really disrupt the day-to-day operations of your facilities”.