The Teeter Totter of Security and Usability – Tony Scott, US CIO at #CHIME16

I was recently at the CHIME Fall Forum and had the privilege of hearing a keynote presentation by Tony Scott, US Federal CIO, that was made possible by Infinite Computer Solutions. Tony Scott has a fascinating background at VM Ware, Microsoft, Disney and GM which gives him a pretty unique perspective on technology and his topic of cybersecurity.

During Tony’s keynote, he made a great plea for all of us working in healthcare IT when he said:

Cybersecurity is important and there’s something that each one of us can do about it!

When it comes to Cybersecurity I think that many people throw up their arms and think that there’s not much they can do. However, if we all do our small part in improving cybersecurity, then the aggregate result would be powerful. That’s something each of us in healthcare should take seriously as we think of how cybersecurity issues could literally impact the care patients receive going forward.

Along these same lines, Tony Scott also suggested that members of CHIME (largely healthcare CIOs) should work to share with peers. Cybersecurity is such a challenging problem, we have to share and learn from each other. I saw this happening first hand in a few of the cybersecurity sessions I attended at the conference. Healthcare CIOs were happily sharing security best practices with each other. The reality is that everyone in healthcare suffers when healthcare organizations suffer a breach and erode the confidence of patients. So, we all benefit by sharing our experience and knowledge about cybersecurity with each other.

Tony Scott also framed the cybersecurity challenge when he said, “Every time we have a breach, we could think of it as a quality issue.” No doubt this was calling back to his days at GM when quality issues were a major challenge, but what a great way to frame a breach. When there’s a breach, there’s something wrong with the quality of the product we provide our healthcare organizations and ultimately patients. With that mindset, we can go about making sure that the health IT product we provide is of the highest quality.

While I enjoyed each of these insights from Tony Scott’s keynote, I had the unique opportunity to be able to head backstage to the green room to talk privately with Tony Scott and the team from Infinite Computer Solutions that was hosting him as keynote. We had a brief but interesting discussion about his keynote and the challenges of cybersecurity in healthcare.

During our discussion, Tony Scott offered an important insight about the balance of cybersecurity and usability when he compared it to a teeter totter. Far too many organizations treat cybersecurity and usability like a teeter totter. If you make something more secure, then that makes things less usable. If you make things more usable, then they’re going to be less secure. Or at least that’s how many people look at cybersecurity.

In my discussion with Tony, he argued that we need to look at ways to raise the teeter totter up so that there’s not this give and take between security and usability. We should look for ways to make things extremely usable, but also secure. I’d suggest that this is the challenge we must face head on in healthcare over the next decade. Let’s not just settle ourselves with the teeter totter effect of security and usability, but let’s strive to raise the teeter totter up so we preserve both.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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