NHS Planning to Go Paperless by 2020

UK Government’s £4bn investment in the NHS with the aim of going paper-free by 2020. Kyle Lady at Duo Lab have the following comments on it.

Kyle Lady, at Duo Security:

“While this may seem like an easy step toward savings and cutting down on paper usage, there are significant security challenges if this initiative is not considered thoroughly.

All too often, security is thought of as something you apply to the product once you’ve built it. In reality, for a product or system to be secure enough for high-value information (like the medical records of an entire country), it has to be designed with security in mind. When healthcare.gov, the US health insurance exchange website, was first rolled out, there were a litany of security vulnerabilities that allowed attacking to steal identities of users. It took tens of millions of dollars to fix the already-over budget system’s security and performance problems. Much of this could have been avoided by bringing in security experts early in the design process.

This certainly is the way of the future, but that future could be one of leaks of patients’ most private information if NHS’s systems aren’t designed from the ground up with security in mind.”

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