The Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz) has formed a new Cyber-Health Information Technology Advisory Board as part of an ongoing effort to support cybersecurity innovation and bolster advanced technology industries.
The advisory board will be led by the University of Southern California (USC) Center for Body Computing and will include leaders from in technology and digital health, and from industries including IT and cybersecurity.
The advisory board will work to help further identify, define and communicate the cyber risks versus benefits associated with health IT solutions. The board will also identify existing collaborative processes that can help enhance the overall cybersecurity position for healthcare technology, before developing pilot projects to address gaps and test solutions.
The board also will look at past system hacks and what can be learned from them, such as the WannaCry global attack this past May.
"California's entrepreneurs and innovators are on the cutting edge of technologies that will redesign everything from how we commute, grow our crops and manage our health," Panorea Avdis, director, Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development, said in a statement. “Cybersecurity is a critical core component of all of these growth industries, and we are partnering with education and industry experts to ensure data is secure and protected."
The USC Center for Body Computing will lead the advisory board with its founder and executive director, Leslie Saxon, M.D., serving as chair.
"We're honored to partner with the Governor's Office of Business and Economic Development to spearhead the Health IT advisory board to assure we are defending patient information against hacking vulnerabilities and ensuring medical data is shared but safe while also adequately notifying the public about potential risks," Saxon said.
The Health IT advisory board Chris Tyberg, division vice president Information Security for Abbott Medical Devices; Amy Tong, director and State chief information officer for the California Department of Technology (CDT); Darin Andersen, MBA, co-chair of the Economic Development Subcommittee for Cybersecurity Task Force of the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services; Bill Britton, vice president of information technology and chief information officer, California Polytechnic State University; Wainwright Fishburn, Global Head, Digital Health, Cooley LLP; John Mattison, MD, chief medical informatics officer at Kaiser Permanente, SCAL; and Andrew Thompson, chief executive officer of Proteus Digital Health.
The advisory board will develop a white paper that outlines both immediate collaborative opportunities and a long-term strategy to bolster cybersecurity for health IT and mobile health.
