A security researcher's own inpatient care experience involved the very drug infusion pumps he had recently discovered were susceptible to hacking. The systems don’t use authentication for their internal drug libraries, which help set upper and lower boundaries for the dosages of various intravenous drugs that a pump can safely administer. Therefore, anyone on the hospital’s network—including a patient in the hospital or a hacker accessing the pumps over the internet—can load a new drug library to the pumps that alters the limits, potentially allowing the delivery of a deadly dosage. A hacker couldn't alter an actual drug dosage, but could change the allowable upper limit for a given drug, meaning that someone could then accidentally (or otherwise) set the pump to give too high or too low a dose.
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Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.